Ted Cruz says bitcoin will stabilize Texas electrical grid—right here’s why he’s improper

A man in a open-collared shirt addresses a crowd with a mic.

Enlarge / Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. (credit score: Gage Skidmore / Flickr)

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) thinks he has discovered a method to stabilize Texas’ electrical grid in case one other deep freeze hits the state. He desires to make use of the facility of bitcoin.

“Due to the power of bitcoin mining to activate or off instantaneously, you probably have a second the place you might have an influence scarcity or an influence disaster, whether or not it’s a freeze or another pure catastrophe the place energy technology capability goes down, that creates the capability to instantaneously shift that power to place it again on the grid,” Cruz instructed the Texas Blockchain Summit final week.

There are just a few the reason why what he mentioned doesn’t add up. However let’s begin along with his assumptions. First, giant bitcoin-mining operations use a whole lot or hundreds of highly effective computer systems, which create a requirement for energy. If energy vegetation can profitably mine bitcoin utilizing the electrical energy they generate—and there are examples of that already—it stands to cause that bitcoin mining might create sufficient demand that buyers could be enticed to construct new energy vegetation. These vegetation might theoretically be tasked with offering energy to the grid in instances of emergency.

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