Crypto Miners May Pay More for Electricity
According to local news reports, Washington state’s Chelan County Public Utility District (PUD) has suggested a new pricing structure to deal with the increased demand for electricity from cryptocurrency miners.
Difference Between Current and Proposed Pricing Structures
The Chelan PUD is responsible for electricity, water, telecom and waste water public utilities in the district.
The Customer Utilities Rate Advisor for Chelan PUD, Lindsey Mohns explained the difference between the current price structure and the one that the utilities is proposing.
Mohns stated that the proposed electricity rate structure was more or less the same as what cryptocurrency miners were paying right now. The main difference in the new rate structure, called Schedule 36, will be that it will bring market considerations into the pricing of energy since the utility has to now buy power so that it can serve the variable and fixed loads that are incurred by cryptocurrency mining.
Kimberlee Craig, the Chelan PUD Public Information Officer explained that their district was addressing the electricity rate structure in such a manner that it would take care of costs as well as protect the interests of their existing customers who have invested greatly in their system.
The investments that the PUD was referring to were the fixed expenses incurred by the utility, including the cost of investing in infrastructure.
After the disclosure of the new pricing structure, many people in the cryptocurrency community expressed their displeasure at the increased costs. However, since the demand for electricity is more than the available supply, cryptocurrency miners would need to pay more for electricity.
Banning Cryptocurrency Mining
According to data analyzed by Digiconomist, BTC mining alone consumes more electricity that some countries such as Austria and the Czech Republic use. In fact, in the US, about 24.5 homes can be powered by the amount of electricity that BTC mining consumes. And considering that there are now more than 2,000 cryptocurrencies in the world, most of which are mined, that is a tremendous amount of power being diverted to crypto mining.
And it doesn’t help that unscrupulous crypto miners have drawn the wrath of governments.
Earlier this year in April, the Chelan PUD had found that some cryptocurrency miners were getting unauthorized access to their electricity, which led the utility to order a ban on cryptocurrency mining in their district. Chelan wasn’t the only city to do so in Washington. The city of Ephrata also imposed a one year ban on cryptocurrency mining in their area due to similar reasons.
Internationally too, cryptocurrency miners faced bans on their mining activities. The Quebec government in Canada had also banned such activities, only lifting the moratorium on electricity sale to crypto miners in May this year.