Ethiopia Cuts Bitcoin Miners to About a Quarter of Contracted Power

Bitcoin miners in Ethiopia are receiving about 23% of the electricity they contracted for, after the state utility cut supply in response to falling water levels behind its hydropower dams. Ethiopian Electric Power made the reduction ahead of the dry season and is holding what is left for households and manufacturers. Bloomberg reported it on Tuesday and at least four crypto outlets carried the story on Tuesday and Wednesday. Mining had been the utility's largest single source of customer revenue.

The size of the cut reads two ways

PANews, TrendsnAfrica and CryptoNews all describe a reduction of about 75%. TFTC puts it at 77%, and Cointelegraph's Wednesday headline does the same. Both numbers sit against one residual: PANews gives the 75% figure and "only 23% of contracted volume" in a single sentence, and 100 less 23 is 77. Nobody reconciles them. No outlet publishes the megawatt totals that would settle it, and the Bloomberg report underneath all four accounts is behind a paywall and could not be read for this article.

Why the water ran short

Inflows into the reservoirs are running at least 20% below what the utility expected, which CryptoNews and TFTC both attribute to El Nino conditions. Hydropower supplies roughly 95% of the utility's output, so a thin water year is a thin year for everything on the grid. CryptoNews reports losses of up to 50 megawatts per generating unit as levels drop, a figure no other account carries. Mining was the first load cut. The utility's chief executive, Ashebir Balcha, has said the decision was made early and on purpose.

"Because we anticipated this through early forecasts over the past few months, we acted quickly to reduce power supply to data mining," Balcha said, in a quotation carried by TFTC alone.

What the utility gives up by cutting

Mining was about 35% of Ethiopian Electric Power's revenue in the past financial year, a share PANews, TrendsnAfrica and CryptoNews agree on. In local currency, CryptoNews and TFTC put data mining at 50.37 billion birr over the last fiscal year, ahead of every other customer category. None of them converts that to dollars. Miners also drew close to a third of the country's electricity, though the 9,730-megawatt figure attached to that share is called total capacity by one outlet and total production by two others, which are different things. Operators without generation of their own have little room when a grid tightens, and some of the largest have spent the year shifting rigs into AI work instead.

What October decides

TrendsnAfrica alone reports that the utility holds power-purchase agreements with 39 mining companies, 31 of them already running, and that those contracts commit it to supplying at least 98% of contracted volume; the same account gives the tariff as about 3.2 US cents per kilowatt-hour. If that commitment is real, current delivery is far under it, and no outlet reports what the contracts say happens next. TFTC puts Ethiopia at roughly 2.4% of global hashrate, about 23 exahashes a second, and says most of it is now sidelined — one account, uncorroborated. Difficulty adjusts about every two weeks, so a loss of that size would show up in the network's own arithmetic before it showed up anywhere else, and miners elsewhere have already absorbed double-digit difficulty swings this year. Balcha has said the utility will reassess in October, once the new water year's generation picture is clear.