Georgia is moving to crack down on illegal cryptocurrency mining in the mountain municipality of Mestia after officials blamed hidden operations for a sharp surge in electricity use, repeated outages and stress on the local grid.
Why Mestia?
Vice Prime Minister Mamuka Mdinaradze said Mestia’s electricity consumption exploded to 133 million kilowatt-hours in 2025 — roughly 13x what a comparable municipality would use (about 10 million kWh). Authorities say that spike is largely driven by unregistered crypto mining rigs taking advantage of the region’s cheap or free power, putting pressure on infrastructure and degrading service for residents and tourists.
What the government will do
- Deploy meters across villages and settlements in the Mestia municipality to pinpoint unusually large electricity draws and expose hidden mining operations.
- Keep a baseline of free electricity for households up to a fixed limit, but apply tariffs to consumption above that threshold. Officials stress the policy targets illicit miners, not ordinary households.
- Involve law enforcement to back up the metering effort, identify large-scale theft and respond to any obstruction.
Impact and costs
Mdinaradze said grid overload has weakened supply quality and caused outages that have hit local residents and tourism businesses. The government estimates annual losses from unlawful power use at 20–25 million lari (about $7–9.4 million), a burden that it argues is partly borne by power consumers across Georgia.
Why this matters in Georgia
Georgia’s abundant hydropower and historically low electricity prices have long attracted Bitcoin miners — both licensed and unlicensed. The country was an early hub for industrial mining (Bitfury opened a 20 MW facility in Gori in 2014), and recent reporting shows industrial data centers — mainly mining operations — still consume large shares of national power: 556 million kWh from January to September 2025 alone.
A wider enforcement trend
Georgia’s move mirrors a global pattern of governments targeting illegal mining tied to power theft. Thailand seized mining rigs in 2025, and Russia has implemented a registry to track unlicensed operators. The crucial test for Mestia will be whether meter installations can reliably distinguish normal household use from large-scale hidden mining — and do so without cutting off or unfairly penalizing residents who depend on free electricity within legal limits.
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