An electric utility company in the Canadian province of British Columbia, which is controlled by the state, has announced that it intends to put a temporary stop for the next 18 months to any new requests for electrical connections that are made by cryptocurrency miners. This plan is being carried out in order to save money.
In a statement that was made public on December 21, the British Columbian government broke the news in an announcement that they had issued. According to the statement, the pause will provide the government and BC Hydro with the opportunity to develop a permanent framework that is capable of better balancing the requirements of cryptocurrency miners with those of the residents and businesses in the region. This is something that has been explained as being possible as a result of the pause.
Seven bitcoin mining plants are now connected to the grid that is maintained by BC Hydro.
It is not expected that these six additional wind farms, which have a total capacity of 273 megawatts when combined, will be damaged in any way by the outage.
On the other hand, new cryptocurrency mining projects will not be able to begin the process of connecting with BC Hydro, and projects that are already in the early stages of the connection procedure would also have their progress paused, according to what was mentioned. Additionally, it was mentioned that there are already 21 cryptocurrency mining projects that have asked for a combined total of 1,403 megawatts of electricity to run their operations.
According to the information that was provided by the Ministry, this quantity of electricity is equal to the amount that would be required to power around 570,000 households or 2.1 million electric automobiles in the province on an annual basis.
The British Columbia hydro and electricity authority released a paper with the title “Crypto dilemma” in the month of December 2022. In the report, the authority issued a warning that an unprecedented amount of requests for cryptocurrency mining operations might potentially strain the existing energy supply and lead to higher electricity costs for inhabitants of the province of British Columbia.
Proof-of-work (PoW) mining is now prohibited in the state of New York, making it the first state in the United States to implement such a ban. The implementation of any new mining activities that are not completely powered by renewable energy sources is expressly prohibited under this rule.
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