Beginning Tuesday, the country’s energy utility provider will not accept new requests for electricity from Bitcoin mining businesses.
Landsvirkjun, Iceland’s national electricity utility, has reduced the amount of electricity it will offer to certain companies, including aluminium smelters and Bitcoin (BTC) miners.
A representative from the island’s power utility stated that the utility has been forced to reduce energy allocations to southwestern Bitcoin miners and various industrial facilities due to a variety of issues, including a power station outage, low hydro-reservoir levels, and difficulty obtaining energy from an external supplier.
Mining businesses have long been drawn to the region owing to its availability of geothermal energy, which is harnessed to generate a cheap and abundant source of renewable energy. However, Landsvirkjun reports that from Tuesday, any new requests for power from mining activities would be refused for an undetermined amount of time.
Three major Bitcoin mining businesses have established operations in Iceland: Canada’s Hive Blockchain Technologies, Genesis Mining, and Bitfury Holding.
Miners have been attempting to achieve the promise of environmentally friendly Bitcoin mining in Iceland for almost a decade. Cloud Hashing relocated 100 miners to Iceland in 2013. HydroMiner GmbH, an Austrian business, raised around $2.8 million in November 2017 via an initial coin offering to put mining equipment directly into Icelandic power facilities.
Non-renewable energy sources account for less than 1% of the country’s electrical generation. The aluminium smelting sector in the nation has been worst damaged by the distribution failure. Aluminum prices increased 1.1 percent on Tuesday, reflecting a supply shortage caused by a recent jump in demand and the current power supply shortage.
Green blockchain projects have risen in popularity globally in 2021. At the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, thought leaders discussed energy-intensive Bitcoin mining. At the convention, the GloCha United Citizens Organization for Climate Empowerment was launched. It will achieve climate change goals via the use of blockchain technology.
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