Iran Power Generation, Transmission and Distribution Company (Tavanir) has again told all cryptocurrency miners to suspend work during the three summer months.
Mostafa Rajabi Mashhadi, the company spokesman, said the move should help reduce the heavy load on the national grid during the peak season, way2pay quoted him as saying on Wednesday.
Stakeholders have objected to the decision saying such measures are unwarranted and hurt Iran’s cryptomining industry as seen last year.
It is often noted that cutting power to legal miners has no significant impact on the power network simply because their collective electricity consumption is negligible compared to most other sectors.
Licensed miners say the utility should not cut supply to miners in every part of the country, as there are some regions with no shortages even during the peak season.
In mid-2019 the government said it would accept cryptomining as a legal industry. Miners were required to acquire license from the Ministry of Industries and pay electricity bills based on export rates.
However, cryptominers are blamed for power shortages that fuel public frustration in summer when the lights are off despite the fact that the share of authorized e-currency miners in the total national consumption is meager.
When the power situation worsened last summer, Tavanir started shutting cryptomining units to prevent blackouts.
To ease mounting pressure on the national grid, former president Hassan Rouhani last May ordered a blanket ban on all cryptomining until the end of summer.
Disbanded illegal cryptomining farms and centers in Iran are said to be near 6,900 since the crackdown began in 2020 and most were in five provinces, namely Tehran.
Total power consumption of the banned centers was nearly 645 megawatts, which was the same as the annual consumption of three major provinces, namely North Khorasan, South Khorasan and Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari.
Tavanir last year claimed that illegal miners used 3.84 trillion rials ($16.5 million) in subsidized electricity and inflicted 380 billion rials ($1.3 million) in damages to the grid.
This is while, the Majlis Research Center, the research wing of the parliament, recently assessed the impact of the government ban on cryptomining and closure of unauthorized mining centers, saying that the policy was a failure.
Results of the MRC review were published on its website, in which the ban is seen as unwanted, unhelpful and irrelevant.
“Estimates about the total volume of cryptocurrencies mined in Iran between April and August 2021 show that more than half the illegal miners were indifferent to the government’s decision to ban cryptomining,”the report said.
It added that based on data from the Ministry of Industry, Mining and Trade “total power consumption of unauthorized cryptominers was in the range of 800 megawatts, whereas the national grid logged a deficit of 10,000 megawatts during the peak season.”
