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The average retail cost of one kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity in the United States is around 10 cents. Like all averages, there are always lower costs. For large industrial consumers, the average US falls below seven cents per kWh. In a city in the United States, Massena, New York, the industrial tariff was only $ 0.02 per kWh. If your company uses a lot of electricity, Massena, located on the St. Lawrence River, is the place to be.
It did not take long for the bitcoin miners to find Massena, nearby Plattsburgh and other cities in the United States where there was cheap electricity. Bitcoin mining is an energy-intensive process that, with an estimate, consumes 215 kWh of electricity just to verify a bitcoin transaction. This is the bitcoin mining, being the first to track and verify the path of a transaction through the blockchain. Once a miner has verified a transaction (called proof of work), the job is rewarded with a bitcoin payment.
Because a single transaction can only involve a fraction of a bitcoin (currently trading on the futures market for around $ 7,700), some miners use thousands of computing devices to solve complex mathematical transaction paths and manage their equipment 24 hours per day, seven days a week. The more compute power a miner generates in a transaction, the greater the chance of being the first to verify the transaction and be paid.
The state of Washington offers the country's most economical average industrial electricity at only 4.37 cents per kWh. The eastern part of the state, in particular, offers some of the lowest rates in the country, largely due to the abundant generation of hydropower. The industrial rate in East Wenatchee is 2.39 cents per kWh, and it is no accident that Microsoft, Dell and Yahoo have built huge data centers in the city. In neighboring Quincy, the average industrial rate is 3.28 cents per kWh, still less than half the national average.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, the following 10 states have the lowest average industrial electricity rate in the country. [19659006] Washington: 4.37 cents per kWh
EIA does not report these data at city level, but ElectricityLocal.com allows searches by city and returns residential, commercial and industrial rates. The problem is that you have to know what city you are looking for.
Bitcoin mining is not just a phenomenon of the United States. Even other countries with low-cost electricity attract miners. At the beginning of this year, China has extracted about 60% of the world bitcoin, but provincial governments have begun to shut down "illegal" mining activities. Iceland, where clean and renewable geothermal energy generates the nation's electricity, is a current hotspot. Canada, like the United States alone, has abundant hydroelectric resources and electricity costs can fall below four cents per kWh for mining companies. Russia is rich in hydropower and nuclear energy and the country is actively encouraging other mining operations.
The cheapest country for miners is Venezuela, where an estimate puts the cost of mining a bitcoin at $ 531, less than a third of Uzbekistan, the next cheaper, where it costs $ 1,788 to extract a bitcoin.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Plattsburgh, New York, has stopped the new bitcoin mining operations while the city develops regulations to contain energy consumption. Massena, which will soon be affected by the closure of an Alcoa aluminum foundry in 2019 and still injured by the closure of a General Motors plant in 2011, has reached an agreement with Coinmint, the bitcoin miner, to lease the space that had already illegally commanded and allow the miner to manage 16,000 mining computers. Following a moratorium on mines imposed by the New York Energy Authority, another cryptominer, Blockchain Industries, demolished plans to build a mining operation in Massena that would cost about 600 million dollars and has created 500 jobs.
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