BC Hydro Electricity Rates for Crypto Mining in 2026: What It Actually Costs

BC Hydro's default residential pricing is the tiered rate (Rate Schedule 1101). You pay a lower price for a baseline block of electricity in each billing period, and a higher price for everything above it. As of 2026, the Tier 1 threshold works out to 22.1918 kWh per day — approximately 1,350 kWh on a standard two-month bill, or about 675 kWh on a monthly bill. The Tier 2 energy charge is held at 14.08 cents per kWh under the rate design the B.C. Utilities Commission approved in February 2025, with Tier 1 sitting at roughly 11.87 cents per kWh. A net bill increase of 3.75% took effect April 1, 2026, alongside a −1.5% deferral account rate rider.

BC Hydro also offers a flat rate plan (Rate Schedule 1151) — one fixed price per kWh regardless of volume — and an optional time-of-day overlay that discounts overnight consumption and surcharges the evening peak. For high-consumption households, the flat rate frequently beats the tiered rate, which matters a great deal for anyone running hardware that never sleeps. We work through that math in the sections below.

Here is the single most common error in crypto mining cost articles about British Columbia: quoting the Tier 1 rate as "the BC Hydro rate." It isn't — not for a miner, and understanding why will save you from badly underestimating your operating costs.

The Tier 1 threshold of roughly 22.2 kWh per day was set at about 90% of the median usage of homes in BC. In other words, a normal household already consumes most or all of its Tier 1 allowance just running the fridge, the lights, the laundry, and — in winter — the heat. Now bolt on a single modern ASIC miner drawing 3 to 3.5 kilowatts continuously. That one machine alone consumes 72 to 84 kWh per day, more than three times the entire Tier 1 allowance, before the household uses a single watt.

The consequence is simple: mining consumption is incremental consumption, stacked on top of whatever the household already uses. Nearly every kilowatt-hour a miner draws lands above the threshold and is billed at the Tier 2 marginal rate of 14.08 cents per kWh. That is the honest number to use for every cost calculation, and it's the number we use for our own Comox Valley operation. This is also why BC Hydro's flat rate plan is worth a serious look for anyone with sustained high consumption: when virtually all of your usage is Tier 2 anyway, a single fixed price below 14.08 cents wins. Run your own numbers with BC Hydro's rate estimator — the right answer depends on your household baseline.

The table below applies the Tier 2 marginal rate of 14.08 cents per kWh to common ASIC hardware classes, assuming 24/7 operation. Power draws are manufacturer-nominal figures; real-world draw varies with firmware, ambient temperature, and power mode. All costs are in Canadian dollars. Months are calculated at 30.4 days.

Two observations follow directly from that table. First, at BC rates, efficiency (joules per terahash) is everything: a legacy S9-class unit burns roughly a third of the power of an S21 but produces a far smaller fraction of the hashrate, which is why old hardware that still pencils out in 3-cent jurisdictions is a money pit at 14 cents. Second, even a modest four-unit setup is a four-figure monthly electricity commitment — which is exactly why our own operation stays deliberately small and why we published a full cost breakdown of what a 300-unit facility would require for anyone tempted to extrapolate upward. For interactive what-if numbers, use the crypto data center calculator.

Whether those electricity costs are recovered by mining revenue depends on Bitcoin's price, network difficulty, and pool or solo strategy — all of which move constantly. We deliberately do not publish profitability projections: this page is about the cost side, which is knowable, not the revenue side, which is speculation.

BC Hydro's optional time-of-day pricing is designed for households that can shift consumption — EV charging overnight, laundry after 9 p.m. A mining load can't shift; it runs around the clock. So does time-of-day pricing help, hurt, or wash out for a constant load? Here's the arithmetic.

The structure applies a 5¢/kWh discount from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. (8 hours) and a 5¢/kWh surcharge from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m. (5 hours), with the remaining 11 hours at the standard rate. For a perfectly flat 24/7 load, the net effect per kWh averages out to: (8 hours × −5¢ + 5 hours × +5¢) ÷ 24 hours = −0.625¢ per kWh. Against a 14.08¢ Tier 2 rate, that's roughly a 4.4% reduction — about $16 per month on a single S21-class unit. Real, but modest.

The more interesting play is peak curtailment: pausing hardware during the 4–9 p.m. surcharge window. A miner that runs 19 hours a day and skips the peak entirely captures the full overnight discount while paying zero surcharge — the effective discount jumps to about 2.1¢ per kWh on the hours it does run, at the cost of losing roughly 21% of daily hashing time. Whether that trade is worth it depends on your hardware and the network, but it's the same load-shaping logic we cover in depth in our power grid strategies guide. As with everything on this page: time-of-day terms are optional rate structures that can change, so confirm the current program details with BC Hydro before building a strategy around them.

What the ban does: it permanently relieves BC Hydro of any obligation to provide new dedicated service connections to cryptocurrency mining operations. No new industrial mining project can enter the connection queue. What it doesn't do: it did not shut down the existing operational mining facilities that were connected before December 2022, and it does not make owning or running mining hardware illegal in British Columbia.

Where does that leave small-scale operators? A hobbyist running a handful of ASICs behind an existing service — which is what our Comox Valley setup is — is simply not the thing the regulation was written to stop; the policy targets new connection applications from operations demanding megawatts. But honesty cuts both ways: BC Hydro's residential tariff defines residential service as energy used in a dwelling, and scaling up commercial-grade consumption on a residential rate can put you offside the tariff's terms. If you're considering hardware, read the Electric Tariff and talk to BC Hydro about your actual situation. This page is information, not an instruction manual for working around provincial energy policy — and frankly, the policy's logic is hard to argue with: crypto mining consumes enormous power and creates few local jobs, and BC chose to spend its clean hydro on electrification instead. We think the honest response is to be small, transparent, and upfront about it, which is the entire editorial position of this site.

Canada's provinces have split sharply on crypto mining. Quebec restricted the sector early: Hydro-Québec capped allocations and imposed higher rates on crypto loads after its own flood of applications. Manitoba froze new connections in late 2022, and New Brunswick placed a moratorium on large requests. British Columbia went furthest — the first province to make its ban permanent.

The outlier is Alberta, whose deregulated market lets miners buy power on the open market — often gas-generated — without connection restrictions, which is why displaced Canadian mining capacity has drifted east. In the U.S., Texas and central Washington remain the reference mining hubs, with industrial power contracts that can undercut BC's residential rates, though with grids that are far less clean. That's the trade at the heart of it: BC's grid is over 90% hydroelectric, and the province decided that clean advantage was worth more pointed at heat pumps and EVs than at hashrate. For a small operator already here, 14.08¢/kWh of nearly carbon-free power on an existing connection is the deal on the table — decent by residential standards, uncompetitive against industrial mining contracts, and the reason we treat mining as real infrastructure rather than a business model.

The Bitcoin mining operation whose electricity bills inform this page and the SCR token are related by ownership — both are part of the same Strategic Crypto Reserve project — but they are not financially linked. SCR is a parody utility token used for NFT redemption within the ecosystem. Holding SCR tokens grants no claim on mining proceeds, hash power, or block rewards, and there is no profit-sharing mechanism between the two.

What the mining operation provides is the raw material for pages like this one: real BC Hydro bills, real rate data, and firsthand operating knowledge from Vancouver Island. For the rest of the project's blockchain infrastructure, see the project whitepaper — and treat the token and NFT side, as it describes itself, as entertainment and community engagement rather than an investment vehicle.