Chad Harris got an urgent phone call during last February’s epic Texas winter storm, something he was expecting as the operator of the single largest bitcoin mining and hosting facility in North America.
“You need to shed your power now; we need it,” Harris said, recalling the conversation with his local transmission company in Central Texas. As CEO of Rockdale-based Whinstone, which later became a subsidiary of Riot Blockchain, he had a ready answer.
“I told them we already had done it two days ago,” he said.
That storm left at least 4.5 million electricity customers in Texas without power.
This time around, there’s been a year of dialogue between mining companies, the governor’s office and the state’s grid operator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Miners met with Gov. Greg Abbott in October and said they would shut down in the event of another winter storm.
Earlier this week, Riot Blockchain sent a letter to Abbott with its plan to voluntarily shut down and had 99% of its operations powered off by 7 p.m. Wednesday.
“Last year, the miners turned off during [the] winter storm, but there were fewer bitcoin miners then and less megawatts to be taken offline,” said Lee Bratcher, president of the Texas Blockchain Council, an association representing the blockchain industry. “It still made an impact on thousands and thousands of homes. But this year, there are more and larger mining operations that can push back power and they’ve been proactive.”
After the 2021 storm, ERCOT contacted mining companies — drawn to Texas by lower energy costs — for help since they are heavy electricity users. ERCOT realized miners could assist in balancing supply and demand during extreme weather by shutting down operations and selling unused power back to the grid as part of an emergency response program.
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Yeah, and you can save more gas by not driving a Hummer instead of not driving a Honda Civic. Any virtue you may derive from that still needs to be balanced against the gas-guzzling you had been doing before. I’m glad that the coin miners were willing to do their part to keep my lights on, but let’s not throw them a parade just yet.
Cryptocurrency mining is something that should be subject to interruption of power at any time for any reason. Then, start interrupting it every 10 minutes until the worthless pieces of crap wasting power give up and leave.
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