New bill would grant regulatory power over crypto mining to three North Carolina counties
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A new bill in the North Carolina legislature would allow Henderson, Polk, and Rutherford Counties to prohibit or regulate crypto mining. Republican Sen. Tim Moffit, who represents the three counties, is the primary sponsor of Senate Bill 774.
If passed, the law would only apply to those three counties and their municipalities.
As NC Newsline reported previously in a series of reports about a proposed facility in Pitt County, crypto mining, the process that verifies bitcoin transactions and creates new coins, relies on a vast network of powerful computers.
The centers’ high electricity consumption, primarily from fossil fuels, raises major environmental concerns. The noise pollution generated by the fans needed to keep the servers from overheating has also become a significant concern to communities where the centers are located.
In recent years, the proliferation of these data mining centers across the state has sparked backlash from some local communities.
Cherokee County passed a resolution in December 2023 requesting more regulatory power from the state legislature, but those efforts failed, according to Cherokee County Commissioner Ben Adams in an interview with WUNC earlier this year.
“We passed a resolution to our state and federal representatives just trying to get them on board to pass some type of legislation that would help with this problem. And of course, it fell upon deaf ears. I was always told as a kid by my grandpa, ‘the two strongest men in the world is the man that controls the water and the man that controls the power.’ Who knows how much money they’re making off these, so it’s not going to be very high on the list.”
It’s unclear what prompted the introduction of the new bill. Newsline reached out to Moffit’s office for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
In May 2023, Henderson County passed a 60-day ban on new crypto mining saying it was the “only way to avoid negative effects of new cryptocurrency mining.”
It cited noise and heavy electricity usage as the reasons for the moratorium.
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