• Free energy is available in certain regions of Georgia’s Svaneti mountains.
• This year’s consumption was 237% more than in previous years.

For the sake of averting electricity shortages in Georgia, residents of Svaneti have been ordered to swear a holy oath not to mine crypto. Macrotrends show that from 2000 to 2019, tourist expenditure in Georgia’s northwest Svaneti area grew every year. The Covid-19 epidemic, on the other hand, sank tourism in 2020 and has only lately started to recover.

Hundreds of locals turned to crypto mining as a last resort, which has been blamed for causing major power outages. The local media outlet Sputnik Georgia cites a video showing miners cramming into a church on December 30, 2021, to swear an oath to St. George that they would not mine crypto in the future. Such promises have traditionally been regarded as unbreakable.

Such Consumption Termed “Unsustainable”

An electric firm that supplies power to crypto miners in the Svaneti town of Mestia has threatened to raise energy bills in response to complaints by local people. Free energy is available in certain regions of Georgia’s Svaneti mountains, making mining more appealing. Residents in nations where electricity is cheap to have complained about the influx of bitcoin miners. Kosovo and Kazakhstan have enacted bans on cryptocurrency mining.

A declaration by the Mestia municipality towards the end of 2021 said that crypto mining had a significant impact on Mestia’s electricity supply. This year’s consumption was 237% more than in previous years.

“Unsustainable” was Energo Pro’s word for the massive growth in consumption. When contacted by local journalists on January 5, the energy company revealed that the area was using 27 megawatts of electricity, about four times as much as the infrastructure could manage.