By George Ward
Gone are the days some select nations retain their status as Bitcoin mining hubs. The wind is gradually moving to other countries with less interaction with cryptocurrency. Thanks to its abundant energy reserves, Norway is now the leading European country in Bitcoin mining.
Going The Miners Way
Norway currently boasts abundant hydropower-produced energy, making it the largest crypto-mining hub in Europe. Several multinational mining firms like Bitfury, Bitzero, Bitdeer, and COWA have set up shops in the Nordic country.
In addition to the foreign companies, local players like Kryptovault and Arcane Green Data are also taking advantage of the country’s abundance of power to up their production.
Furthermore, the country has an edge over others due to the differences in power costs across the Nordic region. As Europe’s biggest hydropower manufacturer, Norway also boasts abundant renewable energy sources.
The country’s hydropower source accounts for 92% of electricity production, with wind contributing 7% of its combined energy. According to a recent update from Jaran Mellerud, the HashRate Index’s researcher, there is a reason why Norway has become the new European Bitcoin mining hub.
Mellerud, in a Twitter thread, explained that the stranded hydropower had placed the country as the biggest Bitcoin mining hub in the Eurozone. According to the researcher’s estimate, Bitcoin mining in Norway consumes around 250 MW of electricity, which equals the country’s share of the global hashrate production (about 3%).
Furthermore, Mellerud added that as an electricity powerhouse, the country had generated the second-highest amount of electricity per global capita as of 2021. Interestingly, as explained by the researcher, the transmission constraint means that the country divided its electricity market into five different price zones.
However, Mellerud noted that despite its high Bitcoin mining rate, the Norwegian government does not support crypto mining. As a result, the authorities increased the miner’s power tax by $0.014 per kilowatt.
Mining Outlook For BTC
For most of last year, the crypto market has been in a bearish trend, with prices of most crypto assets in the red for an extended period. As expected, this also impacts the value of Bitcoin, with mining profitability (also known as hash price) taking a hit and bottoming in December.
However, at the start of the year, Bitcoin’s hash price jumped by 32% to $0.078, as revealed by HashRate Index. It is worth noting that the metric is calculated in dollars every day based on terahash per second.
Given the current market scenario, experts predict that Bitcoin will perform better than it did last year.