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Author: Admin | 2025-04-28
Paper published in Joule in April, de Vries explained that even the renewables being used for bitcoin mining have their own consequences. Hydropower in particular has huge regional environmental effects and sometimes has to be backed up by fossil fuels. China’s bitcoin mining industry is a case in point:Production of hydropower is high in the wet season during the summer months and low in the dry season during the winter months. As a result, seasonal variability in hydropower is already higher than 30% and expected to increase further because of climate change. In Sichuan, specifically, ‘‘the average power generation capacity during the wet season is three times that of the dry season.’’“As such, the carbon intensity of purchased electricity in Sichuan is much higher than you’d expect based on pure hydro,” de Vries said in an email. And since miners are concerned about energy costs above all else, a glut in coal, oil, or natural gas could make burning them much more attractive.Another emerging concern around bitcoin is the electronic waste. The ASIC mining devices quickly go obsolete, often in just under two years, and they can’t really be repurposed for anything other than mining.“There’s a carbon output attached to this as well, but nobody has looked into this to date (I only recently quantified the e-waste),” de Vries wrote. “This is something no amount of ‘green’ energy can fix.”But mining bitcoins remains profitable, so the amount of hardware it uses and the quantity of electricity it inhales will continue to surge dramatically for years. Another price spike could push energy use even higher. “We fundamentally don’t know how high the price of bitcoin will go,” Bendiksen said. “If the bitcoin price goes up by 10x, you would expect the energy consumption of the network to also go up by
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