Under pressure from crypto miners, NB Power places pause on electricity requests
BNN Bloomberg
New Brunswick's electric utility imposed a moratorium on providing new service to cryptocurrency mining operations last year, saying it was concerned about its ability to meet the increasing demands from the power-hungry sector.
Details about the moratorium are contained in a cabinet order dated March 1, 2022, which endorses the indefinite pause and directs Crown-owned NB Power to conduct a review of the industry and submit its findings by Dec. 31, 2022.
The cabinet document, which recently came to light in a CBC report, confirms that NB Power had received several "large-scale, short-notice" service requests from cryptocurrency mining companies, which were not named.
In February 2021, Vancouver-based Hive Blockchain Technologies Ltd. announced it would pay $25-million in shares to acquire GPU Atlantic Inc., which at the time was operating its own 50-megawatt substation and crypto mining data centre in Grand Falls, N.B.
