Residents of Svaneti, Georgia, have reportedly been forced to take a holy oath not to mine cryptocurrencies in order to address energy issues caused by Bitcoin mining.
Tourism spending drives the economy of Georgia’s northwest Svaneti area, which grew every year from 2000 to 2019, according to Macrotrends. However, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism declined in 2020 and has only recently begun to recover to pre-Covid levels of growth.
To make ends meet, hundreds of inhabitants turned to cryptocurrency mining, which has been blamed for significantly interrupting the power supply.
Residents in the Svaneti town of Mestia have staged protests against cryptocurrency mining, and the electric company that supplies them with power, Energo Pro, has threatened to raise electricity bills.
Svaneti is a hilly region of Georgia that now has free power in some areas, making mining more appealing.
This is a condition that is becoming more common all around the world. Now Bitcoin miners have rushed to countries with cheap electricity.
Rise in electricity consumption
At the end of 2021, the municipality of Mestia published a statement describing the extent to which crypto mining has impacted the local electricity supply. According to the report, “consumption has increased by 237 percent this year compared to previous years.”
Energo Pro, an energy business, called the massive increase in use “unsustainable.” On January 5, the business told local media that the region was consuming 27 megawatts of electricity, about four times what the infrastructure was meant to handle.
