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11.04.2018 15:48Cheap energy in Norway and Sweden for cryptocurrency miners
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Cryptocurrency miners are moving in to Norway and Sweden to take advantage of cheap hydro-electric energy, Reuters cited.
The two countries provide miners with low temperatures to power and cool their servers. Iceland has been Europe’s most popular location for miners of digital currencies such as bitcoin and ethereum. But the average commercial price in Iceland is 8 cents euro per kilowatt hours. So Sweden’s and Norway’s prices, 6.5 euro cents and 7.1 cents per kilowatt hours, respectively, are quite lower and far below the European average of 11 cents.
The interest is good news for Sweden’s Vattenfall and Norway’s Statkraft which are the dominant utilities in their countries. Supplying power to cryptocurrency miners is a tiny part of current business but the two state-owned firms have said they see it as an opportunity.
The process is energy intensive. Miners plug in thousands of servers at a time to get the computing power to produce cryptocurrencies, which is done by solving mathematical equations.
Miners of bitcoin will use about 130 terawatt hours of energy this year, matching Argentina’s consumption or the projected usage of all the world’s electric vehicles by the mid-2020s, according to Morgan Stanley.
Mining a single bitcoin requires $1,400-$1,800 worth of electricity, up to a quarter of the total costs and about the annual power bill of a four-person household in Germany.
In Norway, hydropower accounts for over 99 percent of electricity production while in Sweden the number is about 40 percent with the same again from nuclear.
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