AUSTIN (KXAN) — Cryptocurrency mining is expected to grow significantly in Texas over the next five years, which could have a big impact on our electric grid.
According to estimates from ERCOT, miners could use about five gigawatts of energy by 2023.
“It’s growing from close to zero just a few years ago,” Carey King, the assistant director at UT-Austin’s Energy Institute, said earlier this month.
“Each miner is about the size of a desktop computer. And if you’re a large industrial scale bitcoin miner, you might have thousands of these computers running,” Lee Bratcher with the Texas Blockchain Council said.
Bratcher explained bitcoin mining is a process by which the Bitcoin network is secured, and how new bitcoins enter into circulation.
“To keep it brief, Bitcoin miners are just machines. Their application-specific integrated circuits…are running a hash algorithm, trying to solve a cryptographic equation in order to set the next block of transactions,” Bratcher said. “The blockchain...
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