Waking up to crypto’s threat to energy security

IN an interesting and probably long-overdue development in the United States last week, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced that it would start collecting energy usage data from approximately 130 ‘identified commercial cryptocurrency miners’ operating in the US following the manifestation of a number of worrying signs about the energy-intensive nature of the business and its impact on the electric power industry and consumers. Since that impact is uniformly bad, the implication of this is that new regulations are probably on the horizon.

Philippine governments have generally not been particularly attentive to policy developments in other countries that concern things that could become problems here, whether in energy or any other area, but the current government should pay attention to this. The cryptocurrency business tends to go where conditions are favorable, and without realizing it, the powers that be are steadily working toward making conditions favorable here.