As a sweltering summer grips Iran, the regime has once again imposed rolling blackouts and power outages on millions of citizens. On July 1, the state-run power company, Tavanir, announced the return of the crippling cuts, a measure President Masoud Pezeshkian’s administration has consistently blamed on the public for “high electricity consumption.” This narrative, however, is a deliberate deception designed to mask a vast, criminal enterprise run by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to plunder the nation’s electricity for its own enrichment and to fund its illicit activities.
The regime’s official lie was inadvertently exposed by one of its own officials. Following a recent multi-day internet shutdown across the country, the deputy for transmission at Tavanir, made a startling admission. He revealed that during the blackout, national power consumption dropped by a massive 2,400 megawatts. More damningly, he cited reports showing that the brief internet outage in Iran caused a 5% to 12% drop in global cryptocurrency mining production. This slip confirms that the Iranian regime is operating one of the world’s largest crypto-mining operations, and it is doing so by stealing electricity directly from the people.
The origin of the crisis: a deliberate policy to evade sanctions
The chronic power outages that plague Iran today are not a recent accident but the result of a calculated regime policy. According to official statistics, widespread, crisis-level blackouts were rare between 1990 and 2011. Yet, since 2020, they have become a constant and worsening feature of daily life.
The timing is no coincidence. Following the withdrawal of the United States from the nuclear deal in May 2018 and the return of crippling sanctions on its banking and oil sectors, the regime desperately sought new revenue streams. That same month, the research center of the Expediency Council, a key advisory body to the regime, issued a report recommending that the regime engage in large-scale Bitcoin mining to circumvent sanctions and compensate for its inability to sell oil or access dollars. The report calculated that mining one Bitcoin, which consumes approximately 2,150 kilowatt-hours of electricity, was equivalent to the value of 20 barrels of oil. By June 2020, the cabinet officially put cryptocurrency mining under the control of the Ministry of Industry, solidifying it as a state-sanctioned operation.
The IRGC mafia: the true beneficiaries of the people’s suffering
At the heart of this vast electricity theft is a mafia led by the IRGC and operating directly under the supervision of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s office. While the regime occasionally blames small, “illegal” miners to create a smokescreen, the scale of the operation makes such claims absurd. As regime experts themselves have questioned, no individual could establish mining farms large enough to destabilize the entire national power grid without state involvement.
The IRGC’s central role has been confirmed by regime insiders. In 2020, then-Minister of Energy Reza Ardakanian admitted, “We have issued licenses to foreign investors, including the Chinese, to operate in the field of cryptocurrency mining.” The state-run newspaper Haft-e Sobh further reported at the time that “the largest mining farms in Iran are in the hands of the Chinese, who operate in cooperation with government institutions”—a clear reference to the IRGC. The shocking scale of this plunder was laid bare in a live television broadcast in 2022, when the prosecutor of the regime’s Supreme Audit Court confessed that a single massive crypto farm in Tehran consumes as much electricity as 11 of Iran’s provinces combined.
The conclusion is undeniable. The nationwide blackouts are not a failure of infrastructure but a feature of the regime’s corrupt economic policy. The power is being systematically stolen from homes, hospitals, and small businesses to generate billions of dollars in untraceable funds. This money does not benefit the Iranian people; it fills the pockets of the ruling elite and fuels the regime’s machinery of domestic suppression and foreign terrorism, all while the people are left in the dark.