TEPCO will mine Bitcoin with excess energy CryptoBlog

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Japan’s largest electricity company is about to start mining bitcoin.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) Power Grid is partnering with TRIPLE-1, a local semiconductor designer and developer, to mine bitcoin with excess power across the country, CoinDesk first reported. TEPCO is the country’s largest electricity company by total assets, according to data from Statista.

TEPCO is the utility behind the Fukushima nuclear reactor, which in 2011 was hit by an earthquake and a massive tsunami that knocked out some of its cooling systems, allowing three reactors to melt down. The power company later admitted that it had not taken stronger measures to prevent such disasters. TEPCO is still suffering from the accident, because the compensation of the victims is currently weighing on its profitability. Today, his electricity transmission and distribution company, TEPCO Power Grid, is looking for ways to monetize excess electricity with bitcoin mining through its wholly owned subsidiary Agile Energy X.

TEPCO joins leading global energy companies to jump on the bitcoin mining bandwagon. And a common denominator for most of them is the need to monetize excess power, which BTC mining does very well. ConocoPhillips sells stranded gas to bitcoin miners in the oil-rich Bakken region of the United States — a strategy similar to Exxon’s. The oil giant has reportedly struck a deal with Crusoe Energy Systems to redirect gas that would otherwise be wasted from an oil well to mobile bitcoin mines. TEPCO’s configuration also goes in this direction.

According to a translated version of a Wednesday statement from the Japanese energy giant, Agile Energy X signed a memorandum of understanding with TRIPLE-1 on Nov. 11 to build a constructive strategic partnership. Through this collaboration, Agile aims to deploy distributed data centers across Japan that reuse excess electricity from renewables with TRIPLE-1 semiconductors.

A pilot project has already been set up at the premises of TEPCO Power Grid’s office in the Tokyo metropolitan area, according to the statement. “We have started experiments to confirm the system behavior and the impact on the power grid when the equipment is operated with a large amount of energy at the scale of 1,500 kW, and have confirmed that the equipment can operate normally.”

TEPCO’s pilot bitcoin mining venture in Tokyo with TRIPLE-1. (Image/TEPCO)

“TRIPLE-1’s state-of-the-art processing technology will be used for the computing computers used in this project, and we will exclusively introduce semiconductors with extremely high power performance,” the statement said. “We believe that the selection and introduction of energy efficient products that have a low impact on the environment is an important step towards achieving a carbon neutral society.”

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