monitoring an industry that burns through 2% of all power in the US.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lily Jammale. The business of minting new Bitcoin here in the United States is growing bigger by the day.

Listen to this, in January of 2020, just over 3% of all Bitcoin mined anywhere in the world were mined here.

In just two years, that figure ballooned to almost 38%.

As we've talked about on this show,

mining Bitcoin and some other

cryptocurrencies burns through a lot of power.

And this week the Energy Information Administration has

started tracking this activity on a whole new level.

The federal agency has done some of this work on a whole new level. The federal agency has done some of this

work on its own sifting through articles in the press and company reports, but now

we'll start collecting information from cryptocurrency miners themselves

about where they're operating and how much energy they're using.

I asked Mark Morrie, the Senior Advisor for Electricity Analysis at the EIA, why they're doing this now.

The difficulty is even though we were able to conduct our own survey,

there are lots of resources that we could do.

We really don't have a good handle upon the extent to which

energy use by cryptocurrency miners is occurring. Both regionally, total amount,

just a lot of unknown with regards to that.

So that's why we came up with this survey and have gotten approval to send it out to a collection of respondents.

And that's why we led to where we are today with regards to the press release and the study that you saw last week.

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