Source In the Irkutsk region, due to underground cryptocurrencies, a transition to differentiated electricity tariffs is possible. The region has a cross-subsidization system. For the population, the tariff is set at the lowest bar, and businesses, including large ones, pay the difference. And the work of illegal miners is extremely unprofitable for business. Now in the region it is proposed to introduce a monthly rate of electricity consumption for residents. If it is exceeded, the cost of each kilowatt will also increase.
Own hydroelectric power station is closer to the body
On the territory of the Irkutsk region there are three large hydroelectric power stations at once – Irkutsk, Bratsk and Ust-Ilimsk. Historically, the cost of electricity for the population in the region is one of the lowest in the country. Now it is 1.3 rubles per kilowatt. In the neighboring Krasnoyarsk Territory, citizens pay from 2.28 to 3.66 rubles. In the Republic of Buryatia – about 4.5 rubles. Therefore, the subject has been a Russian mining center for several years. The situation was further aggravated by last year’s ban on cryptocurrency mining in China. Many miners based there moved across the border to the nearest region – the Irkutsk region.
The profitable hobby has become rampant.
Most farms are in Irkutsk, Bratsk and Ust-Ilimsk, but there are also many of them in rural areas. In the people such points are called “beavers”. The cost of equipment is quite high, but if you place it somewhere in a secluded place like a garage or basement, it will bring the owner tens and hundreds of thousands of rubles a month with the most modest amount of equipment. In this case, the energy system of the Baikal region receives huge damage. Experts have calculated that Irkutsk miners now consume the amount of generation of an entire hydroelectric power station.
“Since 2018, the number of gray miners has tripled. 1.8 percent of households consume 23 percent of the total electricity consumption of the population in the region. This provokes technical problems and distracts part of the cross-subsidization. But mining is an entrepreneurial activity that should be charged accordingly,” Oleg Prichko, CEO of the Baikal Energy Company, said at the end of November.
Give out heat and noise
Of course, this problem is also relevant for other Siberian regions. As Rosseti Siberia told Oktagon.Sibir, the presence of mining farms is recorded in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, Omsk Region, Khakassia.
– About a year ago, law enforcement agencies, together with the security department of the Omskenergo branch, carried out operational measures to identify and detain a large group of miners. It took several KAMAZ trucks to remove the seized equipment! – they say in Rosseti Siberia.
“The lower the tariff for individuals in the region, the more profitable it is for miners. The difficulty of identifying them is that they are constantly changing energy connection points, transporting equipment from one place to another.”
| Press service of Rosseti Siberia
Mining is dangerous for electrical networks due to continuous consumption, because their design for the issued household load is carried out taking into account the demand factor, which is 10-20 percent of the declared capacity. As a result, constant accidents.
Initially, crypto traders were caught by the simplest method – relying on hearing and sensations. Bitcoin hardware is very noisy and gets hot. But now they are using advanced technologies – intelligent accounting systems. They monitor energy consumption online, and if it has grown significantly in a particular area, the power engineers immediately see it on their schemes and take appropriate measures. the miner goes through the courts. In two years, the courts have issued 600 rulings on the mining problem. The largest amount was collected in Bayanday – 38 million rubles,” said Andrey Kharitonov, director of the Irkutsk Energy Retail Company LLC.
To equate to a casino
The authorities of the region, meanwhile, are proposing to move mining farms to separate territories. This will have to be done following the example of gambling zones, the head of the Irkutsk region, Igor Kobzev, said the day before. According to him, in the near future a federal law on mining will be adopted, which will legalize this type of activity, after which it will be time for the subjects of the Russian Federation to take the initiative.
“The adoption of the law will introduce this activity into the legal field. After that, I propose to consider the regions of the Irkutsk region in terms of energy shortage and energy consumption, identify zones with a power surplus and make special mining zones there. At the same time, this activity should be banned throughout the rest of the region,” the governor explained.
As for the revision of electricity tariffs in general as a measure to cut off miners from a cheap resource, Kobzev has doubts here. He believes that this will not solve the problem, but will create social tension in the region.
“The topic of tariff differentiation should go through a wide public discussion, including with the participation of deputies. Today this topic is being raised in the media. Someone even collects signatures for its introduction. Both I and all my predecessors understood and defended the need to keep the cost of electricity low for the residents of the region. The low tariff should remain the property of our region. Thousands of people who built hydroelectric power stations are involved in this, contributing to the development of not only Siberia, but the whole of Russia. The position of the government of the Irkutsk region is that it is possible to increase the tariff only by the percentage of inflation,” the head of the region noted.
Tariff behind the scenes
But, despite the governor's call not to rock the boat, the issue has already moved into the political arena. There is a point of view expressed in the region that the decision to introduce a differentiated tariff will eventually be made anyway. This step can be lobbied by large enterprises of the energy and aluminum industries of the Irkutsk region. As you know, all of them are part of the En + Group holding. At the same time, the financial-industrial group will kill two birds with one stone. First, it will stop spending on cross-subsidizing the population as the largest consumer. Secondly, after mining comes out of the shadows, it will get new profitable customers.
The management of the holding emphasized four years ago that it had nothing against cryptocurrency as such. On the contrary, it welcomes the legal development of this type of business and is ready to provide it with specially equipped sites right next to its hydroelectric power plants. En+ Group also stated that the capacities of the Nizhneboguchanskaya and Motyginskaya HPPs, which are being designed in the Krasnoyarsk Territory on the Angara, in the future will be able to work on blockchain technology.
this is not required. If you enter it, then the question of which number to put will already be current. Yesterday there was one number, tomorrow another. Behind every action of the current government, which plays along with large vertical structures and oligarchs, you need to see the essence – who benefits from it. It is beneficial for those who take money from people for electricity, spend on themselves, on aluminum production, and for everyone else – increased tariffs. And the current administration of the region is fulfilling this task, pretending that they cannot cope with the miners, ”says Sergey Levchenko, former governor of the Irkutsk region, deputy of the State Duma of the Russian Federation, first secretary of the Irkutsk regional committee of the Communist Party.
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