Crypto boom hits Texas. Is the grid ready?

Politico
By ARIANNA SKIBELL 
10/13/2022 06:00 PM EDT

Within a year, Texas crypto miners could be using more power than the city of Houston.

The state’s cheap energy and lax regulations have quickly made it the nation’s bitcoin capital. That’s fueling concerns the boom could further imperil Texas’ fragile grid and exacerbate planet-warming pollution.

Mining cryptocurrency is an energy-intensive process. Computers “mine” bitcoin and some other types of digital currency by solving complex puzzles around the clock.

After China banned the practice earlier this year, miners began flocking to Texas, which by some estimates is now home to a quarter of all U.S. digital coin mining operations.

Gov. Greg Abbott has embraced the influx as a way to drive investment in increased power generation. But the magnitude of potential climate damage is prompting the White House to consider ways to crack down on producers of energy-intensive digital assets.

A recent study in Scientific Reports found that mining bitcoin is as energy-intensive as beef production or burning gasoline, and causes comparable climate-related damage when taken as a proportion of market value.

During this summer’s record-breaking heat wave, energy demand in Texas topped 80 gigawatts for the first time ever, prompting the grid operator to urge conservation. The crypto industry says it can quickly reduce its power consumption when the grid is stressed — and did so when energy demand peaked in July.

But critics have raised concern that crypto miners were given hefty subsidies for curtailing use, which helped the industry avoid higher electricity prices.

And on Wednesday, seven Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Texas’ main grid operator expressing concern over the anticipated strain on the grid.

Low water levels caused by drought and a late-season heat wave killed tens of thousands of salmon in a single Canadian creek before they could spawn. The die-off of mostly pink and some chum salmon could devastate local people reliant on the fish as well as the wider ecosystem.

Hurricane Ian
A decade ago, Florida lawmakers effectively killed the state’s ability to check urban sprawl by passing a law called the 2011 Community Planning Act, setting the stage for rampant growth in communities that just got wiped out by Hurricane Ian, writes Daniel Cusick.

The law, passed by a Republican-controlled Legislature with support from then-Gov. Rick Scott, rolled back much of Florida’s 1985 Growth Management Act, which helped the state avoid unplanned, unwise development.

Clean power tussle
An electricity market in the Southeast aimed at supporting clean electricity and lowering costs is set to launch next month, despite a pending lawsuit and disagreement over the program's design, writes Miranda Willson.

Proposed last year by some of the largest utilities in the South, the Southeast Energy Exchange Market is a first-of-its-kind electricity trading program that would affect customers in 12 states.

Winter is coming
Germany has declassified a top-secret energy security assessment, which, only four months before Russia's war began, found that energy supplies “won’t be jeopardized” by increased dependency on Russian gas, writes Hans von der Burchard.

The 2021 assessment also dismissed growing concern that the Nord Stream 2 undersea pipeline designed to carry natural gas directly from Russia to northern Germany would increase the risk of energy blackmail by Russian President Vladimir Putin.