High temperatures in the US state of Texas are creating spikes in electricity demand, and Bitcoin miners are helping to balance the regional power grid.
According to a report from Riot Blockchain's headquarters in Rockdale, Texas, the company would have turned off much of its equipment today to no longer require energy from the local electrical system.
According to Riot in a press release, its current mining power is 4,6 exahashes per second (EH / s), equal to 2% of the total processing power of the Bitcoin network. Riot claims to have 43.458 operating miners.
Currently, a heat wave in the state of Texas has raised the temperature to around 40 ° C, increasing the demand for energy for air conditioning and cooling in domestic and even industrial environments.
The small town of Rockdale, of just 5.000 inhabitants, is located an hour from the city of Austin, which has nearly 1 million inhabitants, and there Riot Blockchain has one of the largest Bitcoin mining facilities in the world.
We need to think about it
They are practically power plants, and the important thing is that in seconds they can be switched off or on when the electricity grid needs our support. Every day this week, between 15pm and 00pm, we shut down the facility when we were notified - Chad Harris, Commercial Director of Riot Blockchain.
In what could be the first public visit of this important Bitcoin mining facility, it highlights the fact that much of the equipment is immersed in coolant, an energy saving technique to maintain the temperature of miners or (specialized) ASICs.
According to Jason Les, CEO of Riot Blockchain, the facilities have "the ability to be flexible enough to feed power back into the grid when demand is high."
For now, Bitcoin's hashrate or total processing power hasn't varied enough to blame Riot Blockchain for a hypothetical downturn.
We reported that Bitcoin's hashrate increased in just a few days by more than the total accumulated by a single mining pool, reaching 235 exahashes per second (EH / s).
