Co-founder of the company Didar Bekbau said on Twitter on Wednesday that crypto-mining company Xive has closed a large farm for 2,500 devices in Southern Kazakhstan due to the lack of sufficient electricity supply from the national grid. According to Xive co-founder Didar Bekbau, mining in the south of Kazakhstan is no longer possible.
Kazakhstan is struggling with a shortage of electricity, partly caused by the influx of crypto miners from China. The southern part of the country is particularly vulnerable because there are not enough powerful power plants in the region, and the national grid cannot reliably transmit electricity from the energy-rich northern region.
Crypto miners such as Xive and Enegix have been facing electricity problems since September due to rationing introduced by the national grid operator KEGOC, which has not yet commented on the situation.
Xive is preparing a new project for more than 2,500 machines, but "it is obvious that mining in the south of Kazakhstan is no longer possible,” Bekbau said.
Other miners in the south of Kazakhstan are also looking for hosting sites to move their mining machines, but the country “has no options left”. Some managed to locate their farms in Russia and the United States.
Last month, the Ministry of Energy published a draft resolution limiting the construction of new farms to 100 megawatts. The ministry later stated that they would not restrict the supply of electricity to legitimate businesses unless it jeopardized the national grid.
Recently, the government announced that it wants to encourage crypto-miners to develop independent renewable energy capacities. According to Sapar Akhmetov, Chairman of the Board of the Kazakhstan Association of Blockchain Technologies, the industry hopes that after Kazakhstan expands its capacity with renewable energy sources in the next one or two years, the limit may change.
According to the Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index conducted by the Center for Alternative Finance at the University of Cambridge, Kazakhstan is the second-largest country in the world in the production of cryptocurrencies after the United States.
