- Johann Snorri Sigurbergsson, a business development manager at the energy company Hitaveita Sudurnesja, said he expected Iceland’s virtual currency mining to double its energy consumption to about 100 megawatts this year. That is more than households use on the island nation of 340,000, according to Iceland’s National Energy Authority.
“Four months ago, I could not have predicted this trend — but then bitcoin skyrocketed and we got a lot more emails,” he said at the Svartsengi geothermal energy plant, which powers the southwestern peninsula where the mining takes place.
“Just today, I came from a meeting with a mining company seeking to buy 18 megawatts,” he said.
Full disclosure: 18MW is chump change. That's two of these.
TIL I've worked on projects that use more power than Iceland.
It helps that they're able to heat and get hot water for their homes from the hot springs there. Fun fact, in older houses the water has a mild sulfur smell because it comes from some of the more mild hot springs, but newer houses don't because they use fresh water that has been heated by even hotter springs.Full disclosure: 18MW is chump change. That's two of these.
You know, I have no idea. I guess not. Now that's surprising. I've toured Intalco. They claim to be the largest consumer of electricity west of the Mississippi. If it takes 13 kWh per kg of aluminum and Intalco produces 230 million kilos of aluminum a year - that would be 3 billion kWh. Dayum. Iceland consumes 17.5 billion kWh. In other words, the houses in Iceland are a flyspeck.Iceland’s three aluminium smelting plants are especially power hungry and the biggest electricity consumers in the country.
So if a continuous flow, that'd be 2000 MW steady for 8760 hours/year. Where I am, overnight load is about half of the daytime peak. Assuming a symmetric load shape, low load overnight would be about 1350 MW and daytime peak about 2700 MW. On a global scale, Iceland is a rounding error. On an Icelandic scale, an 18 MW load could increase their load about 1%. It's surprisingly significant.Iceland consumes 17.5 billion kWh
Good point. I wonder if using "consumes energy" limits the narrative. I searched and found: Today, 99 percent of Iceland's electricity is produced from renewable sources, 30 percent of which is geothermal (the rest is from dams—and there are a lot of them), according to Iceland's National Energy Authority.Oct 20, 2008 Which then leaves Iceland consuming 100-99 = 1% of their energy each year in the form of nonrenewable energy. It's much better than, say Venezuela, doing the same crypto mining while burning dinosaur bones only.