Iran’s state electricity company Tavanir has started disconnecting legal miners of cryptocurrency from the country’s national power grid amid a record surge in electricity use that has caused brief outages in large cities.
“Authorized centers from cryptocurrency mining are switched off as of today to help (reduce) peak load in the grid,” said Tavanir spokesman Mostafa Rajabi said on Saturday.
Rajabi said, however, that authorized miners’ use of electricity had amounted to 300 megawatts (MW) per day, adding that the usage in illegal mining was nearly seven times that figure at around 2,000 MW per day.
The spokesman reiterated previous Tavanir statements suggesting that people who blow the whistle on suspected cases of illegal crypt mining would receive lucrative bounties.
Government official have admitted that rising prices of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have caused a major surge in use of electricity in Iran, a country where power prices are heavily subsidized for household use.
An early spell of warm weather combined with increased crypto mining activities have caused a historic surge in electricity usage in Iran in recent days and led to short blackouts in major cities like the capital Tehran.
The official IRNA news agency said in a Saturday report that electricity usage had reached 53,759 MW in the peak hours of Wednesday, May 19, an increase of nearly 18% compared to the similar day in 2020.
Iranian Energy Ministry officials have also blamed a current dry spell for lower-than-expected supplies of electricity, saying generation in hydraulic dams have decreased by 50% as a result of lower rains this spring.
Officials say the dry spell has also caused an earlier than expected start of electric irrigation systems in the Iranian farms, causing further strain on the country’s electricity supplies.