- The EIA recently released a comprehensive report on energy consumption in the cryptocurrency mining industry.
- Surprisingly, the report indicates that in 2023, the energy consumption of crypto miners in the United States equaled the entire energy usage of Australia.
- The report highlights the rapid growth of the mining sector within the United States.
The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) has recently unveiled a fascinating report on the energy consumption of cryptocurrency mining companies. To put it into perspective, the amount of electricity consumed by these mining enterprises in 2023 was equivalent to the entire energy consumption of Australia.
The report further elaborates that the energy requirements by mining companies last year accounted for anywhere between 0.2% and 0.9% of the global energy demand, similar to what countries like Australia and Greece consume in a year.
Experts have observed a substantial surge in the number of Bitcoin miners within the United States in recent years. In fact, the US’s global share in Bitcoin mining increased from 3.4% in January 2020 to an impressive 37.8% just four years later.
According to representatives from the EIA, mining companies in the United States consume somewhere between 25 TWh and 91 TWh of electricity while engaged in cryptocurrency mining. This amounts to approximately 0.6% to 2.3% of the entire energy consumption in the country. In simpler terms, the energy used by Bitcoin miners is equivalent to the annual energy demand of three to six million households, as estimated by the EIA.
The report also reveals that there are approximately 137 cryptocurrency mining enterprises operating in the United States. These enterprises are distributed across 21 different states, with the majority of their capacity located in Texas, Georgia, and New York.
As a reminder, we previously reported on the significant increase in the difficulty of Bitcoin mining, reaching an all-time high.