Reportedly, Japan’s largest electricity company, Tokyo Electric Power Company (or TEPCO for short), has decided to capitalize on its excess power. They will do this by mining Bitcoin (BTC).
Accident in 2011
To do this, the electricity company has started a partnership with the company ‘TRIPLE-1’, a local semiconductor company.
The electricity company has been in the news before. In 2011, there was a notorious earthquake and tsunami in Japan, which forced the cooling systems of its nuclear reactor to be closed. This resulted in the meltdown of 3 reactors. The company would not have taken sufficient measures to prevent the disaster.
So far, TEPCO is struggling to fully recover from the 2011 accident. The company had to provide victims with substantial compensation that has had a huge impact on their profitability to this day. According to the report, monetizing its excess assets with Bitcoin mining through its Agile Energy X subsidiary has been an option to generate additional income.
A report shows that Agile Energy X signed a memorandum of understanding with TRIPLE-1 to this end on November 11. A pilot project is reportedly already underway.
The partnership between TEPCO and TRIPLE-1 requires Agile data centers across Japan to reuse excess electricity from renewable energy with TRIPLE-1’s semiconductors. The companies report the following about the start of the pilot project:
We started experiments to confirm the system behavior and the impact on the power grid when using equipment with a large amount of power on the 1,500 kW scale. We have confirmed that the equipment continues to operate normally. TRIPLE-1’s state-of-the-art process technology will be used for the computational computers used in this project and we will only introduce semiconductors with extremely high power performance.
It is not entirely unexpected that TEPCO does this. Worldwide, we see a trend that energy companies are now using their excess energy to mine cryptos, of which Bitcoin is the most popular. As a result, less energy is wasted and you can still benefit from the excess part.
This development, in turn, could restore confidence in BTC. On the other hand, this may have little or no effect on the price of the top crypto, as other price drivers such as monetary policy still have a dominant influence on the market. In any case, it is a good step.
