The US Department of Energy (DOE) has canceled its emergency survey of the crypto mining sector's electricity usage after a lawsuit filed by Bitcoin data center operators.
The DOE's Energy Information Administration (EIA) settled the lawsuit this month, dropped the survey and said that it would “destroy any information that it has received or will receive in response to the emergency collection.”
Court records suggest that the EIA will likely seek a new survey without emergency authorization that would give the public 60 days to comment and could take more than a year to complete.
The EIA had expected to begin collecting the data in February under an emergency authorization but was sued by the industry group the Texas Blockchain Council and mining company Riot Platforms.
They claimed that the expedited survey approval violated the Paperwork Reduction Act and some of the data requested was proprietary, including number of mining units, their age, their electric load, and hash rate.
Environmental group Sierra Club filed an amicus brief in favor of the survey, stating that it “risks not just grid operators’ ability to ensure electric reliability to residences and businesses, but prevents grid operators and federal and state regulators from having the information necessary to prevent the abuse of current market rules by cryptocurrency mining companies."
In February, the EIA said that crypto mining represents between 0.6 to 2.3 percent of US electricity consumption - or 25TWh to 91TWh. That is equivalent to three million to more than six million homes' electricity usage.
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At the time, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said that it had 41GW of requests for new cryptocurrency mining capacity, for which 9GW of planning studies have been approved, according to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC).
The EIA said that it had identified a total of 137 crypto data centers to date.
Since the February survey notice, the price of Bitcoin has soared more than 50 percent to an all-time high of $69,000.
A Lawrence Berkeley research report estimated total non-crypto data center power usage at 73TWh in 2020, while the International Energy Agency estimated that global non-crypto data center electricity consumption in 2022 was 240-340TWh.
