On Jan. 27, a group of eight U.S. lawmakers, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, sent letters to the world’s six largest Bitcoin mining companies, demand
On Jan. 27, a group of eight U.S. lawmakers, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren, sent letters to the world’s six largest Bitcoin mining companies, demanding to reveal the detailed data on their electricity consumption. This isn’t the first time Senator Warren requested this information from a mining operation — last month a similar letter was sent to Greenidge Generation, which uses a natural gas plant to power its facility.
These moves highlight the increasing regulatory pressure on crypto mining businesses in the United States. But, as last week’s Congress hearing showed, the growing scrutiny might turn out to be an opportunity to align the mining sector’s development with the broader political push for clean energy. Here are some of the key themes around crypto mining that have captured the lawmakers’ attention and that will likely inform the intensifying policy conversation.
Total energy consumption
A cornerstone of any environmental critique of Bitcoin and crypto in general, the question of how much energy cryptocurrency mining consumes was expectedly prominent at the hearing. In a 2018 paper published in the prestigious journal Nature, a group of researchers predicted that Bitcoin’s growth could singlehandedly push global emissions above 2 degrees Celsius within less than three decades — not a good look given the international community’s stated mission to prevent the planet’s temperature rise of the exactly same magnitude.
Cambridge University Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index set the tone of comparing the yearly Bitcoin-driven consumption to various nation’s levels — and as for now, with its 131.1 TWh per year the most popular cryptocurrency consumes more energy than Ukraine (124.5 TWh) or Norway (124.3), according to this source. The current estimate of Ethereum’s annualized energy footprint by Digiconimist stands at around 73.19 TWh.
None of the most widely cited estimates is beyond dispute, as the recent fact-check report by Bitcoin Policy Institute (BPI) suggests. It cited three separate articles from the peer-reviewed Nature Climate Change journal, one of them debunking the 2 degrees argument as “fundamentally flawed” and criticizing its methodology.
Crypto proponents prefer to compare Bitcoin energy consumption not to nations, but to other industries — in that case, according to the BPI report, BTC’s 0.27% of global energy consumption is less than that of gold mining, although the Cambridge Index sets the two equal.
Fossils vs renewables
In the context of the ever-growing political pressure on energy consumption, the search for a sustainable energy framework becomes crucial for any industry that wants to flourish in the digital age.
The critics of the crypto mining industry have recently highlighted several instances of mining operations relaunching the existing fossil power plants. The authors of the letter that some 70 NGOs sent to Congress ahead of the crypto mining hearing called the legislators’ attention to several such instances, like the relaunch of coal waste plants in Pennsylvania by Stronghold Digital Mining and the partnership between Marathon Digital and coal-fired plants in Montana.
There is also evidence that these are not the only American companies buying up the old ‘“dirty energy” plants to feed their mining operations — the pattern is observed from Texas to Missouri. At the Congress hearing, it was Steve Wright, a former general manager of Chelan County’s in Washington public utility district, who talked at length about the problem. He explained that miners’ interst in dormant fossil facilities is driven by a simple market mechanism: As renewable energy prices (on the West Coast specifically) grow in line with increasing demand, coal prices drop due to investors’ flight ahead of the upcoming 2025 ban on any coal usage in Washington state.
As Represenatives kept returning to this issue over the course of the hearing, it became clear that the tension between the use of fossil fuels for crypto mining and the industry’s potential shift to renewable energy sources is at the center of policymakers’ thinking on the issue. Witness John Belizaire, CEO of green data centers developer Soluna Computing, argued that there exist scenarios under which crypto mining can shift from a being “dirty” energy concern to a vehicle complementing and empowering the renewable energy sector.
Belizaire’s core argument is that computation-intensive tasks like Bitcoin (BTC) mining can be powered by the recaptured excessive (or, in the industry terms, “curtailed”) energy otherwise wasted by clean power plants. According to him, solar and wind farms waste up to 30% of generated energy due to incompatibilities with the old energy grids. Belizaire also addressed the problem of energy shortages allegedly driven by crypto miners, highlighting the fact that the kind of computations that miners execute can be stopped at any moment on-demand.
For now, the…
cointelegraph.com