TEHRAN (Press TV) - 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.
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.