[2018-02-02] Italian Enel will not Supply Power to Miners

[Rick Nolan]

Enel, one of the biggest electricity company in Europe, said it would not supply electricity to the energy-hungry industry of mining cryptocurrencies, adding it has “no interest whatsoever in selling power” for the purpose. The company said it had reached the decision after careful study and analysis.

Source: https://hype.codes/italian-enel-will-not-supply-power-miners

What do you think about Enel's decision?

[asidamani]

Does it mean you cannot mine in industry scale, but you can mine at home?

[Rick Nolan]

Does it mean you cannot mine in industry scale, but you can mine at home?

It just means that one European company lost chance to get profit )

[BitHodler]

Does it mean you cannot mine in industry scale, but you can mine at home?

Enel is just one entity in a market with a lot players. It's a pretty crowded market, where there are enough of them desperately looking to move huge loads of power to the 'hungry' mining industry.

Enel is just acting based on the retarded way of thinking of the higher board. It's an utterly stupid mistake to not supply power in times where people already look to shift over to natural power sources.

This article tries to cover the context under a thick layer of negativity, but it's meaningless. The other part of that market will openly welcome the miners as major power consumers ~ money on the bank is what counts.

[stompix]

And if we follow the news, we might find something very interesting:

The actual news:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/european-utility-giant-says-no-to-crypto-mining-even-with-clean-energy

Enel, one of Europe’s largest power utility companies, announced today, Feb. 1, that they would not be selling renewable energy to crypto mining company Envion.

Enel had reportedly been in talks for a deal with the Swiss-based Envion AG, an off-grid mining company that claims to use decentralized, clean energy to power its mobile mining units, prior to today’s decision not to sell. Each Envion unit is installed inside of a shipping container and can be powered by a solar or wind farm anywhere in the world, eliminating a reliance on any one country’s infrastructure.

And if we go deeper:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/taming-the-power-hungry-blockchain-beast-with-decentralized-clean-energy

Envion is hoping to make cryptocurrency mining cheaper, cleaner and decentralized with their mobile data-centers.

They’ve developed automatized mining units which are installed inside shipping containers. These containers can be relocated around the world with relative ease, reducing the dependency on single governments, economies or infrastructures.

The mining units, which exclusively consume power from reusable, green sources, are placed near energy supply points, such as solar plants and wind farms, reducing the cost of “transporting” electricity and enabling them to easily tap into excess energy production.

And the cherry:

The EVN token will be on sale for 31 days from Dec. 1, 2017, with a max cap of 150 mln.

So , another scam ICO?

[buwaytress]

BitHodler and stompix nailed it on the head (it's one of those non-obvious PR articles, actually). Used to work me up actually, coming across articles and reading them for some seemingly newsworthy content and then discovering the ICO pitch at the end. But I've learnt by now to just deal with it. Can't really blame the monetisation strategy used by news sites, it's legitimate and at least informative (just wish more would be objective).

Enel is one in many, energy providers and resellers will soon be plenty, most more than happy to supply to miners at a commercial rate. Come to think of it, why should they single out crypto mining when there are so many other wasteful non-industrial activities people? Just some principled big banker on the board, my guess. They must really not want to survive in the industry that's getting very, very competitive now.

[SaltySpitoon]

Its not that strange for power companies to not want to supply large quantities of power for non essentials. At least in the US, during peak times or due to unexpected demand, private entities with power generation stations will sell power to the power companies for more than they are charging customers to prevent brownouts.

If you ever get those phone calls on a hot day, where your power company will offer you energy credits at 3-4x your regular billing rate for whatever you save that day, its because they'll have to pay 12x to those independent stations to help make up for what they can't supply themselves.

Anyway, it likely has absolutely nothing to do with currencies, just that they don't want to upgrade their infrastructure for temporary power demand increases.