Iceland snaps power allocation to new Bitcoin miners
Iceland’s national electrical company, Landsvirkjun, has recently cut a significant amount of power that it would have provided for some industries, including Bitcoin miners and aluminium smelters.
An executive has said that the country’s power utility unit has reported that it has been compelled to reduce energy allowance to Bitcoin miners in the southwest along with cutting down allocations for several other industrial facilities owing to a list of issues that include problems at the power station, low levels of hydro-reservoir and energy access from external suppliers.
Mining operations in the country have been doing well in Iceland due to its abundance of geothermal energy that is harvested for creating plentiful renewable energy supply at cheap pricing. However, Landsvirkjun has announced that starting December 7, for an indefinite period of time, new requests for electricity, especially from crypto mining corporations, would be rejected.
The three main mining companies that had opened up in Iceland are Hive Blockchain Technologies from Canada, Genesis Mining, and Bitfury Holding.
For more than a decade, crypto miners have been trying to realize the potentials of an environmentally-friendly Bitcoin mining facility in Iceland.
In 2013, Cloud Hashing had moved 100 miners to Iceland, whereas in 2017, the Austrian firm, HydroMiner GmbH had raised about $2.8 million in its initial coin offering (ICO) for installing mining rigs directly at power plants in Iceland.
Less than 1 per cent of the country’s electricity is notedly generated from non-renewable sources. Especially the country’s aluminium smelting industry has been affected the hardest by the electricity distribution failure.
Aluminium prices had risen to 1.1 per cent on December 7 that reflecting the bottleneck in supply, which is created by a recent surge in demand colliding with power supply crunch.
Green blockchain initiatives have come into the front globally in the year 2021. COP26 conference with thought leaders in Glasgow, Scotland, had extensively addressed energy-intensive Bitcoin mining.
The conference had also seen the launch of the GloCha United Citizens Organization (UCO) for responsible action on Climate Empowerment. It would utilize blockchain technology for advancing climate change objectives.
