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That allows them to capture dollar values for their power -double, triple or quadruple what they’d get by selling it to someone else.” “They use the power before it leaves their infrastructure and is sold into the grid.
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“We set up a mine for them on their site behind the meter,” explains founder and chief executive officer Andrew Webber. Digital Power-Optimization LLC, which claims to have created the concept of “cryptocurrency mining as a service,” uses the function to help power plants and electrical grid operators save money and manage load imbalances. With blockchain in its infancy as a tool for everyday business, that level of energy intensity clearly isn’t sustainable.īlockchain proponents are working on solutions. Bitcoin accounts for a relatively small portion of the thousands of blockchains that are said to be in existence today, and while it likely requires more nodes than blockchains for recording other kinds of data, the latter still represent a major energy suck. The same stigma attaches to the application of blockchain for non-currency purposes, such as tracking product throughout the supply chain and executing “smart” contracts between buyers and sellers. And that means expending huge amounts of electricity: according to Digiconomist, Bitcoin mining alone might be consuming as much energy as all the world’s data centers, with a carbon footprint equal to the city of London.
#ENERGY INTENSITY SERIES#
The prospect of amassing units of this radically new instrument has induced countless “miners” to solve a series of mathematical puzzles to acquire pieces of the virtual coin. If blockchain is ever to fulfill its potential as a reliable way of recording key business transactions, it’s going to have to burn a lot less energy that it does today.īlockchain emerged alongside the invention of Bitcoin as a supposedly immutable ledger, distributed among multiple computers, for recording transactions of the cryptocurrency.