The Public Utility Commission of Texas is suing Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office to keep data about power consumption by large crypto miners out of the public eye.
The PUC says that information could be used by terrorists to target Bitcoin data centers.
Keaton Peters, an energy reporter for Straight Arrow News, joined Texas Standard with the details.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: This all starts with a 2023 bill passed by the state Legislature requiring large crypto mining operations to register with the Public Utility Commission. Who exactly has to register, and what do they have to disclose to the PUC?
Keaton Peters: Yeah, any cryptocurrency mining operation – which, these are large data centers that are full of computers doing calculations; I won’t go into all the details on mining Bitcoin and how it works, but they’ve proliferated in the state of Texas in the last few years – any of those that have a capacity above 75 megawatts of power that they can draw from the grid –
When you say 75 megawatts of power, are you talking about in a day or in a year or what?
That’s a good question. So megawatts is the measurement of like the instantaneous amount of power that a facility is capable of.
So knowing that it’s 75 megawatts doesn’t actually tell you the total consumption. It just tells you, hey, at a moment in time, 75 megawatts is the maximum amount of power that facility could be.
So if they’re drawing more than 75 megawatts, which is a lot of power, then it’s sort of a power spike even? If you’re going to draw more than 75 megawatts, you’ve got to register.
So journalists, including yourself, wanted to see the registration and power use information, right? What happened?
Yeah, I was one of a few journalists who filed an information request earlier this year. And that was to find out what they registered. So this would say not just what’s the capacity in megawatts of these facilities, but also where they are located, who owns them, and other information.
Like ERCOT, the grid operator, has a demand response program that listeners may have heard about. This is where these large facilities, in a moment where there’s power strain on the grid, demand is high – think a heat wave or a winter storm – these facilities actually get paid to turn off their computers and consume less power.
So this information also would have told us how many of those cryptocurrency mines are enrolled in the demand response program with ERCOT and how much of their power the grid operator can actually control.
But the PUC was not coming forward with that information?
No, they were not coming forward with that information. Initially, I had to seek a ruling from the attorney general.
That happens a lot with journalists under the Texas Public Information Act. If you get denied by the agency, the attorney general can weigh in.
And what did Ken Paxton say?
One of the assistant attorney generals in Paxton’s office sided largely in the favor of journalists, with a few little exceptions, but generally they said, like, hey, we think this information should be released.
And then it was in response to that ruling in May that later, around the end of June, the Public Utility Commission of Texas actually filed a lawsuit against the attorney general’s office in an effort to block the release of that information.
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So you wanted this information; the PUC said no. You took it to the attorney general’s office, and Paxton’s office said, essentially, release most of this information.
Now the PUC is trying to hold that back. So we have a situation where the PUC is suing another department of Texas. Does that happen very often?
I’m not aware of any other instances where this has happened.
I’m not going to say that it has never happened before, but certainly everyone who I’ve talked to about this has had a similar reaction of being a little bit puzzled by the fact that different state offices are in a lawsuit against each other around public information.
So what is the case the PUC is making to keep this information secret from the public?
They are saying that the information that the cryptocurrency mine submitted with their registration could, if released to the public and that information gets into the wrong hands, it could lead to acts of terrorism or it could aid terrorists who want to commit violent acts because of connections with critical infrastructure on the electric grid.
How does that sound to you, this argument that the PUC is making, that it would be dangerous to have this information out in the public domain because of the vulnerability to terrorists?
When I went to my sources, I encountered a lot of skepticism about that. People pointed out that information that’s similar but about power plants is available to the public.
I definitely would press for more details on specifically how this creates a risk, and that’s essentially what the attorney general’s office said in its ruling is you’re saying this is terrorism risk but there’s not enough detail.
So what happens now? Are you going to wait on the PUC to push forward with its fight against the attorney general, or what?
Yeah, we wait and see what happens with this lawsuit.
