Senator Ted Cruz says Bitcoin mining is good for siphoning off wasted renewable energy and the Texas power grid.
In view of the repression of China, the Bitcoin mining scene still has no reason to fall into paralysis. After all, there are more crypto-friendly countries, especially the USA. The US state of Texas in particular seems to be a suitable home for miners. Senator Ted Cruz believes that his country should use natural gas to mine Bitcoin (BTC) rather than torch it.
In his speech At the Texas Blockchain Summit on Friday, Senator Cruz presented his plan, according to which Bitcoin mining could be used to monetize energy that is generated by oil and gas production and does not get into the normal electricity grid. He explicitly spoke of “enormous opportunities for Bitcoin to capture this gas instead of wasting it.”
Natural gas is wasted because there are no transportation facilities to get it to where it could be used the way it would normally be used
, he added. Coin Metrics founder Nic Carter published on Twitter a transcript of Cruz’s lecture. Accordingly, half of the natural gas flared in the country is currently burned in West Texas. Cruz makes three important theses. Firstly, miners can produce off-grid by using the natural gas produced during oil production as an energy source, which otherwise simply fizzles out.
Texas has a lot of renewable energies
Then the mining companies could participate in the demand management. They feed energy into the grid exactly when the population needs it most. Thirdly, the miners can prevent renewable energy from being silted up somewhere in the grid because it is currently in abundance. This concept is by no means new. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has also thought about miners as a driver for renewable energies.
The nice thing about Bitcoin mining is that if you can connect to the internet, you can use that energy and derive a value from this renewable energy that would otherwise not be possible.
said Cruz.
Texas holds a special position among the US states because of the cheap and abundant renewable energies. Other miners are trying their luck in Kazakhstan, Norway or Canada to get cheap green electricity. Due to the success of the Bitcoin project in El Salvador, which is now beginning to be successful, people are also thinking about a state-funded Bitcoin mining project that uses renewable energies is operated.