The United States has recently been hit by a severe winter storm, with extreme low temperatures and widespread power outages impacting not only people's lives but also the Bitcoin mining industry. With the power grid under immense pressure, many miners have cooperated with power rationing measures to suspend or reduce operations, resulting in a significant decrease in the Bitcoin network's hashrate and a corresponding increase in block generation time. This has once again raised market concerns about energy, hashrate, and the stability of the blockchain network.
Extreme weather disrupts power grid, forcing miners to implement large-scale power rationing.
This winter storm, which swept across multiple states, brought severe cold, blizzards, and icy conditions, causing power outages for over a million households. Power grid operators issued energy conservation and load warnings. To help stabilize the power system, many Bitcoin mining farms proactively reduced their electricity consumption or even shut down entirely to avoid consuming large amounts of power during periods of power shortage.
Under these circumstances, the market estimates that approximately 200 EH/s of the network's hashrate is temporarily offline, which is the main reason for the recent decline in Bitcoin's hashrate.
Mining pool hashrate plummeted, and block generation time lengthened.
Data from mining pools shows that the impact on the United States is particularly evident. The hashrate of Foundry USA , a major global mining pool, has fallen sharply from its peak, at one point dropping by about 60%. Luxor, another major North American mining pool, also experienced a significant decline, indicating that this hashrate contraction is not an isolated event at a single mining farm, but rather a collective response to overall grid pressure.
With a significant amount of computing power offline, the average Bitcoin block generation time has exceeded the original target of 10 minutes, slowing down transaction confirmation speed in the short term. On-chain data shows that block times have lengthened to over 12 minutes at one point, leading the market to anticipate a substantial downward adjustment in the next mining difficulty adjustment.
The automatic adjustment mechanism has been activated, and network operation remains within normal limits.
It's worth noting that the Bitcoin network itself has self-correcting capabilities. When the computing power deviates from normal levels for an extended period, the system will rebalance mining efficiency through a difficulty adjustment mechanism to ensure that blocks are generated within a reasonable timeframe.
Therefore, although the block generation rate has slowed down in the short term, it has not affected the security or basic operation of the Bitcoin network. As the weather improves, miners return to online, and the hashrate recovers, the block generation pace is expected to gradually resume.
Miners become "buffers" for the power grid, bringing renewed attention to their role in energy.
This incident also highlights the new role of Bitcoin miners in the energy system. In recent years, an increasing number of large mining farms have participated in demand response programs, enabling them to quickly reduce load during peak hours and even feed electricity back to the grid in exchange for compensation or power points, thus helping to stabilize the overall power supply.
Compared to the Texas winter storm in 2021, when cryptocurrency mining was not yet deeply integrated into power grid dispatch, mining farms have now gradually become flexible electricity users in the power system, playing the role of a "buffer" in extreme weather.
Overall, the impact of the recent winter storms in the United States on Bitcoin is a short-term, systemic consequence, rather than a structural problem. As power supplies return to normal, computing power flows back, and block generation times stabilize, the market impact is expected to gradually diminish.
However, as some miners begin to shift towards businesses that require a more stable power supply, such as artificial intelligence and high-performance computing, whether the mining industry can maintain a highly flexible power consumption pattern under similar grid stress scenarios in the future will be an issue worthy of continued attention.
