According to Bloomberg News, battery startup, Northvolt AB reveals that Sweden must not waste green energy funded by the state on a local Bitcoin mine, thereby indicating that the competition for getting access to the renewable power supplies of the country is heating up.
The firm, which the Goldman Sachs Group Inc backs, is running a cell factory in Skelleftea and has plans to set up another plant in Gothenburg. This effort is part of a trend wherein manufacturers are too eager to tap into Sweden’s wind and hydropower sources to decarbonize the assembly lines.
This access to renewable electricity that is not so expensive has appealed to many ventures, including a green steel startup that has the backing of the founder of Spotify Technology SA, Daniel Ek, and a hydrogen-based shipping fuel producer. Northvolt believes that the crypto mine of Genesis Digital Assets, located in Ortrask, must not draw benefits from the energy tax incentive on state-fund since it does not contribute much to the job market and consequently to the overall economy.
Bloomberg News says that as per Jesper Wigardt, spokesperson for Northvolt, green electricity is equivalent to new gold, and Sweden is currently sitting on it. However, instead of allocating the same to those industries that extend real value, it is being wasted on Bitcoin mining data centers.
Wigardt also states that the mine uses up almost one-third of the Northvolt Skelleftea plant but offers employment to only a fraction of it. In the long-term, Skelleftea plans to employ as many as 4000 workers at the site, but presently, it has plans to recruit 1000 people at Skelleftea.
In 2017, Sweden extended a tax rebate of 35 ores ($0.04) per kilowatt-hour, which can sum up to millions of dollars annually for the larger factories to data centers so that more investment is attracted.
The financial supervisory authority of the country and environmental protection agency called late last year for a Europe-wide ban related to energy-intensive crypto mining. So far, no such signals have been received from Sweden’s federal government to restrict such practices.
According to Bloomberg News, following China’s move to ban crypto transactions last year, Bitcoin miners are on the lookout for new homes to carry out their operations, and many have settled on Russia, Kazakhstan, and North America. As per the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, Sweden had a share of 1.2% in Bitcoin mining in late August.
