Cleanspark bitcoin mining is not causing power surges, said Jellico Utilities President and CEO Joe Carroll.
"The bitcoin — because I've heard some of them say that — they're not going to cause a power surge at your household," Carroll said. "They pull a steady voltage, and I've got the data on that, too. You can look at their load factor. They peak up to their demand, and they run 24/7 really steady."
Carroll spoke at the Jellico Utilities Authority meeting on July 28.
"A lot of times, especially if you have lightning strikes and it hits the power line, that can surge," Carroll said. "That's a true surge, but now if you have a power outage and the voltage dips, that's a power dip, not a surge. Components in your household — and keep in mind, we get a lot of people that will contact us and think that we owe them to replace all their appliances and things like that. There's no neglect on our part to be able to control a power surge. That's why we have an insurance company. When we turn it over to them, we're totally out of that. It's up to them whether or not they pay on a claim. It's out of our hands, but any kind of lightning strikes, even equipment failures, that's not the utilities' issue. Customers still hook up to the grid at their own choice. Now if we're negligent and we hook up the wrong transformer and burn everything up in your household, that would be taken care of. That's negligence, and our men would be responsible for that. But equipment failure or a lightning strike or if you lose ground in your household and you're not grounded well and you're having stray voltages, that's on the customer, unfortunately. You can imagine that's why you have homeowner's insurance, as well."
Jellico Utilities Authority chair Sarah McQueen brought up the matter.
"There's a lot of issues that the customer, because they've went 20 years, let's say, or 25 and not had an issue, but that doesn't mean the issue's not on their side," Carroll said. "And it doesn't mean it necessarily has to be on their side. It could be a bad transformer. Let's say there's a bad transformer. Now we would come out and change out the transformer, but the utility wouldn't be responsible for a bad transformer."
That wouldn't be negligence, Carroll said.
"The customers need to report that to us," Carroll said. "Our guys need to do the due diligence and go out and check connections, check the transformer, see what we can find out. There may be a point of time where it could be negligence if it turns out something where we're not doing our job to go out and check that. So I would encourage everybody to report that to us. Let us check. We'll check all of our connections, but at the same time, you may want an electrician to check your side."
