Crypto miners are preparing for a volatile weekend in the U.S., as a brutal winter storm has brought freezing temperatures and power outages to the country.
“Please be prepared for some ups and downs this weekend as we deal with the winter storm,” Neil Galloway, the Director of Mining Operations at Compass Mining, said on Twitter, adding that sites in Texas were offline. “Because your miner is offline, people can heat their homes and cook.”
Riot Blockchain said it would close its Rockdale, Texas, office because of the bad weather. Core Scientific filed for bankruptcy earlier this week. The company said it would “participating in multiple power curtailments to help stabilize the electric grid.
“BTC production is expected to decrease during this time,” the company said on Twitter.
The National Weather Service said a blizzard and an “arctic blast” from the Midwest to the Northeast, with snow caused by the Great Lakes in that area. From east of the Rockies to the Appalachians, temperatures will be 25 to 35 degrees below average. Gusty winds will cause “dangerously cold wind chills” in the central and eastern parts of the U.S. over the holiday weekend.
“In some spots, the wind gusts could approach or exceed 60 MPH resulting in damage and power outages.” the agency said. “These winds atop existing snow cover will produce ground blizzards.”
PowerOutage.us, a website that keeps track of power outages in the U.S., showed on Friday afternoon that hundreds of thousands of people were without power. Maine, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina were where the outages were the worst.
In Tennessee, a utility company asked customers to use less, and some Twitter users said that spot prices were rising.
One user wrote, “Miners off, furnace back on”, and said that the temperature had dropped to -4 degrees Fahrenheit. “Yes, that’s a 5-min spike to $1.12/kWh.”
