Rephrase single title from this title EIA reaches agreement with bitcoin miners, will destroy collected data and publish latest survey proposal . And it must return only title i dont want any extra information or introductory text with title e.g: ” Here is a single title:”

Update, March 1, 2024: The U.S. Energy Information Administration told a federal district court on Friday that it has “formally withdrawn and ceased” the emergency collection of information from crypto miners and agreed to “destroy any information that it has received or will received in response to the emergency collection.”

Instead, EIA will publish within the Federal Register a brand new notice of proposed data collection, with a 60-day public comment period, and it’s going to also consider any comments submitted in response to the unique proposal.

Dive Brief:

• The Biden administration appears to have reached an agreement with bitcoin mining firms over the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s plan to gather energy usage and other data from the sector. A federal district judge on Thursday canceled a preliminary hearing on the matter and wrote that the parties “represented to the court that an agreement-in-principle was reached.”
• EIA had planned to start collecting the information in February under an emergency authorization but was sued by the Texas Blockchain Council, or TBC, a nonprofit representing the industry, and mining company Riot Platforms, which said the expedited survey approval violated the Paperwork Reduction Act and a few of the data requested was proprietary.
• Details of the agreement are under wraps however the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division, has ordered the parties to file details and a proposed order by Friday.

Dive Insight:

EIA this month estimated annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining “probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption,” and said there are increasing concerns in regards to the impacts on electricity costs, grid reliability and emissions that led to the event of a survey of mining operations.

“The increased demand related to cryptocurrency mining can present challenges to the operation of electricity grids,” EIA said.

The crypto sector generally takes the other view, nevertheless, arguing that mining loads can actually help manage the grid and maintain reliability by going offline in times of high demand. 

Ultimately, the federal government has the authority to gather energy usage data, TBC founder and president Lee Bratcher told Utility Dive. But EIA’s planned survey of the sector included “several questions our attorneys imagine exceed their authority,” he added.

Some of the information requested by EIA “comprises highly proprietary information including the variety of mining units, the age of the units, their mining electric load, and the mining hash rate,” TBC and Riot said of their grievance. “That information, taken along with the power’s electric consumption, could permit competitors within the U.S. and abroad to reverse engineer an organization’s mining operation.”

“This is a case about sloppy government process, contrived and self-inflicted urgency, and invasive government data collection,” the parties wrote. EIA must have offered interested parties the prospect to comment before moving ahead with the information collection, they said.

Sierra Club filed an amicus temporary with the court this week, arguing that delaying the information collection “risks not only grid operators’ ability to make sure electric reliability to residences and businesses, but prevents grid operators and federal and state regulators from having the knowledge obligatory to stop the abuse of current market rules by cryptocurrency mining firms.”

“Bitcoin operations have already caused increased reliability risks and costs for the Texas grid,” Cyrus Reed, conservation director for the Sierra Club Lone Star Chapter, said in an announcement. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas “has even warned that it has limited visibility into crypto operations’ forecasts and that operators don’t respond consistently to requests to go offline during high demand.”

But TBC’s Bratcher says the other is true. ERCOT pays miners to chop energy consumption during times of high demand — Riot received greater than $31 million in August for modulating its consumption as heat and power demand spiked. Mining operations are referred to as “large flexible loads” in ERCOT, and in January they curtailed usage multiple times during Winter Storm Heather.

“These curtailments closely aligned with times of high systemwide prices or public appeals,” in keeping with an ERCOT report on the response to Heather. However, “the magnitude of response was not consistent day after day,” the report said.