Iris Energy received $2.3 million to curtail bitcoin mining at Texas site in August

Sustainable bitcoin miner Iris Energy reported receiving $2.3 million in power credits last month, primarily driven by voluntary curtailment at its Childress site in Texas during peak demand.

The company mined 410 bitcoin, creating a revenue of $11.4 million, according to its latest investor update for August. It spent $6.6 million on electricity, which was reduced to $4.3 million due to the credits.

This resulted in a profit of $7.1 million, averaging out at $17,300 profit per bitcoin.

Mining bitcoin with renewable energy

Around 97% of the power used for its mining operations come directly from renewable energy sources, while the remaining 3% come via renewable energy credits.

Iris Energy situates its mining operations near renewable energy sources, such as hydro power stations. In the case of its Canal Flats operation, it absorbs some of the power station’s excess capacity.

“Energy market volatility (e.g. lots of wind, solar, weather events) and our tech stack then dynamically trading bitcoin mining profitability against electricity market pricing. I.e. automatically pivoting between highest and best use of our power,” said Iris Energy co-founder and co-CEO Daniel Roberts, in response to a query about the energy costs on X (formerly Twitter).

The power credits were received as part of a state program in Texas that offers energy credits to bitcoin miners to lower their energy use during periods of congestion on the grid. Rival bitcoin mining firm Riot Platforms received $31.7 million for similarly lowerering its usage in August.

Last month, Iris Energy also announced an initial purchase of 248 NVIDIA artificial intelligence H100 GPUs for around $10 million. While bitcoin mining remains its core operation, the company said next-generation data centers serving burgeoning computing markets like generative AI represent an additional opportunity.

Average bitcoin miner revenue per TH/s has fallen 40% since May, according to The Block’s data dashboard — coinciding with a fall in the price of bitcoin and the increasing total hashrate on the network.

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