The Texas Bitcoin mining farms remain offline because of the massive winter storm that hit the state and damaged the state’s power grid. In our latest bitcoin news, we are reading more about it.
While some of the mining farms stopped operations due to the power outages, others sold electricity back to the grid at a premium as per Ethan Vera who is the co-founder of Luxor Tech which is a US-based crypto mining company. However, most mining farms remain offline. Due to the outage, the hashrate generated from the Luxor mining pool decreased by 40% and the majority of the hashrate for the mining pool comes from the US mining farms as Vera said.
While it’s not clear what percentage of hashrate in the global mining pool comes from Texas, some of the biggest BTC mining companies like Layer 1 and Bitmain have operations in Texas because of the cheap electricity in the state. Bitmain built one of the biggest mines in Rockdale back in 2019 while Layer 1 started operations in West Texas in 2020. Publicly traded BTC mining company Argo Blockchain announced that it intended to acquire land to build mining facilities in West Texas too.
Some mining farms took advantage of the situation by selling local residents their unused electricity as JP Baric, the CEO of MiningStore said:
“Some bitcoin miners were able to capitalize on selling their unused energy back to the grid for a huge profit.”
Texas’ power grid lost a smaller portion of the energy production in the past weekend because of the wind turbines that got frozen and the natural gas was scarce according to the senior director of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas Dan Woodfin. By Sunday, all types of energy sources like nuclear plants, coal plants, and thermal generate fell off the grid because of the winter storm according to a report in the Austin American Statesman. According to TechCrunch, more than 30 gigawatts worth of energy is offline with 26 gigawatts coming from thermal energy. The Texas bitcoin mining farms are at a loss but there were some in Kentucky that were affected by the storms as well.
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