Up until quite recently, Texas was “very open for business, as it were, for Bitcoin mining.” That’s how Jaime Leverton, CEO of Canadian Bitcoin miner Hut 8, put it on the latest episode of Decrypt’s gm podcast.

“They have in West Texas, in particular, a lot of renewable assets that are looking for stable base loads like a Bitcoin miner can provide,” she said. “So I think it was just a really, really nice fit between the needs of the state and what a Bitcoin miner can uniquely provide as really an industrial-scale battery.”

That symbiotic relationship has worked because unlike data centers, whose always-on client agreements make voluntarily shutting down impossible, Bitcoin miners can cut their power consumption when there’s a lot of demand on the grid. (“We scale up and down within minutes on a regular basis based on the needs of the grid,” Leverton said.) And so far, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has been willing to extend incentives to miners that do it.

But a bill introduced in March, Texas Senate Bill 1751, seeks to limit those benefits granted to Bitcoin miners that cut their power consumption when Texas, which has a power grid independent from the rest of the U.S., is experiencing high demand. 

On Tuesday, the bill was unanimously approved in a state Senate committee vote. 

It still needs to win approval from the full Senate before it heads to the state’s House of Representatives and then Governor Greg Abbott’s

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Author: Stacy Elliott

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