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Bitcoin Power United States

Over 2 Percent of the US's Electricity Generation Now Goes To Bitcoin (arstechnica.com) 106

Posted by EditorDavid from the making-a-hash-of-things dept.
"In the last few years, the U.S. has seen a boom in cryptocurrency mining," writes Ars Technica. But they add that the U.S. government "is now trying to track exactly what that means for the consumption of electricity. Specifically, a crucial branch of the U.S. Department of Energy.

"While its analysis is preliminary, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates that large-scale cryptocurrency operations are now consuming over 2 percent of the U.S.'s electricity." That's roughly the equivalent of having added an additional state to the grid over just the last three years."

While there is some small-scale mining that goes on with personal computers and small rigs, most cryptocurrency mining has moved to large collections of specialized hardware. While this hardware can be pricy compared to personal computers, the main cost for these operations is electricity use, so the miners will tend to move to places with low electricity rates. The EIA report notes that, in the wake of a crackdown on cryptocurrency in China, a lot of that movement has involved relocation to the U.S., where keeping electricity prices low has generally been a policy priority.

One independent estimate made by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance had the US as the home of just over 3 percent of the global bitcoin mining at the start of 2020. By the start of 2022, that figure was nearly 38 percent... The EIA decided it needed a better grip on what was going on... To better understand the implications of this major new drain on the U.S. electric grid, the EIA will be performing monthly analyses of bitcoin operations during the first half of 2024.
The Energy Information Agency identified 137 bitcoin mining operators, of which 101 responded to inquiries about their full-capacity power supply. "If running all-out, those 101 facilities would consume 2.3 percent of the US's average power demand," the article points out. And they add that in at least five instances, the Agency found bitcoin operators had "moved in near underutilized power plants and sent generation soaring again...

"These are almost certainly fossil fuel plants that might be reasonable candidates for retirement if it weren't for their use to supply bitcoin miners."
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Over 2 Percent of the US's Electricity Generation Now Goes To Bitcoin More

Over 2 Percent of the US's Electricity Generation Now Goes To Bitcoin

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  • Ban crypto. This is absurd. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eunomion ( 8640039 ) on Saturday February 03, 2024 @01:51PM (#64210990)
    It literally doesn't do anything, and yet it consumes resources and harms the environment.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 )

      Not all crypto is like this. Ethereum moved to a proof-of-stake model for specifically this reason.

      • Okay. Then just ban resource-consuming crypto.

        • Re:Ban crypto. This is absurd. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Saturday February 03, 2024 @03:41PM (#64211262)

          Okay. Then just ban resource-consuming crypto.

          A broad carbon tax would make more sense and hit all frivolous uses of electricity.

          • True.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by dryeo ( 100693 )

            Doesn't work as the opposition will blame all inflation on it and use the "Axe the Tax" as a campaign issue.

          • A broad carbon tax would make more sense and hit all frivolous uses of electricity.

            Maybe instead of artificially raising the costs of fossil fuels we could make real and actual cost reductions to the alternatives. I can think of one reason not to bother raising fossil fuel taxes, if Congress can vote the tax in to existence then they can vote it out of existence.

            Why must every problem require the government to impose taxes and subsidies? It's like someone with a hammer thinking every problem is an infant's skull.

            I believe the government should have a very light touch on energy supplies.

          • Agreed on treating all uses equally. The atmosphere doesn't care about BTC. It cares about CO2 andCH4.

            But: No taxes are needed.

            Just start ramping down or stop new exploration / drilling permits.

            • Just start ramping down or stop new exploration / drilling permits.

              Do you expect the Russians, Saudis, and Venezuelans to cooperate with that?

              There will always be someone willing to pump oil.

              The solution must come from reducing demand, not supply.

              • Obviously difficult and agreed that we need to reduce demand too (the effort is well on its way btw).

                There are ways to align foreign entities with your policies. Sanctions, confiscation of assets, etc. See FCPA.

                Many countries are thinning out the supply of drugs, to varying degrees of success.

                CO2 in the atmosphere is orders of magnitudes more damaging than drugs, because:
                1) It affects millions of species rather than just one.
                2) It affects all individuals of those species rather than a small minority.
                3) It

        • Why stop there? Just ban anything that consumes resources that you don't personally like.

      • That doesn't answer the question of what it does though

      • It would be better if we used leaves for money. At least then people would do something useful like grow trees and plant forests.

        What is the point of eth?

        • Leaves are money. Get enough of them and you can make some good compost. They don't call it black gold for nothing.

  • Fueled by idiots too stupid to switch their workloads over to the vastly more lucrative AI workloads that are as equally worthless to society!

  • It was finally retired a few years ago due to the cost of operating an nuclear plant compared to natural gas. Restart it and pay for the operation with Bitcoin.

    • Or... just stop the senseless madness. Starting nuclear plants to fuel pointless wastefulness is just absurd.

  • Consumerism (Score:5, Insightful)

    by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Saturday February 03, 2024 @02:07PM (#64211030)
    But this is what we've based our economies on since the end of WWII; endless consumption. However much energy we can generate, whatever natural resources we can find to exploit, consumerism will ensure that we use it as fast as it becomes available. We need better ways to govern how we live.

    • Re:Consumerism (Score:5, Insightful)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday February 03, 2024 @02:21PM (#64211068)

      Nearly all other forms of energy consumption actually achieve something in the world, be that you watching TV, keeping cool, having your products made, or just plain fun. Bitcoin achieves nothing. This is not consumerism, it's a demonstration of what a retarded species we are.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by penguinoid ( 724646 )

        Bitcoin achieves money transfers. That the ultimate result is mostly meaningless is little different than other stuff we do. Agreed that consumerism isn't a good descriptor of this.

        Some effects of bitcoin: money spent on chips on a $/(FLOPS and efficiency), some transactions got facilitated, some people investgambled, and enough CO2 to completely negate the sum of multiple half-hearted greenwashing efforts.

        • Re: "...watching TV, keeping cool, having your products made, or just plain fun." & "Bitcoin achieves money transfers."

          Yep. That's consumerism. I shop for stuff I don't need therefore I am.

          • "Bitcoin achieves money transfers." Yep. That's consumerism. I shop for stuff I don't need therefore I am.

            Bitcoin does not achieve money transfers. If you want to transfer money you can do it cheaper faster and easier than using bitcoin. Virtually no consumer transactions occur on the bitcoin blockchain, and those that do virtually universally result in a conversion to an actual functional currency at either end of the transaction.

            Again my point: It's a completely useless waste shoehorning itself poorly into the middle of something we've already been doing, transferring money. I meant it literally when I say it

            • I bet some people do use Bitcoin for transactions even though it's less convenient & more expensive than other methods. It's digital asset pegged to the price of electricity. But it's still consuming & that's the whole point. We gotta use up those resources as fast as we can! Welcome to our consumer society hell-hole.

        • Bitcoin achieves money transfers.

          No it doesn't. We have been doing money transfers without bitcoin faster and more efficiently since computers were invented to calculate numbers. Bitcoin has not achieved this, and even as it's core marketing point, it's actually really REALLY bad at doing it.

          • The same thing is true of stocks, stocks cause money transfers and could themselves even sort of be used as an inconvenient form of money. While stocks represent ownership of a company and its factories and such, bitcoins represent proof of wasted computing power and a transfer of money from bitcoin buyers to miners to coal power plants & chip factories.

            And bitcoins could even be used as money, either directly with a big fee or indirectly with a big risk. Though I preferred the Aztec version of money, c

            • The same thing is true of stocks

              Yes but since stocks don't use 2% of Americas power we're less concerned about the fact that they aren't (allegedly, I don't have time to address stock's value directly) providing value.

      • We've finally arrived at the point where someone claims that sitting around and watching TV amounts to "achieving something". Couch potatoes rejoice!

        • What do you mean "finally"? We've known and discussed the basic human need to be creatively stimulated since the days of kids playing with sticks in the mud while their parents watch a street theatre performance in the middle ages. Watching TV achieves something, for your brain. Otherwise people wouldn't do it, it is after all a completely optional activity.

          Pretending basic entertainment isn't a necessary stimulant is just ignorant. Sure some people don't watch TV, they may get their creative stimulation in

          • For decades, TV has been lambasted as a braindead substitute for reading or playing games (especially low tech ones outdoors). Now it's a creative endeavor? No, no it isn't.

            • For decades, TV has been lambasted as a braindead substitute for reading or playing games (especially low tech ones outdoors). Now it's a creative endeavor? No, no it isn't.

              The question isn't whether is provides quality or education. The question is whether it fills the fundamental need for entertainment, which it absolutely does, and does so to a point where it has actively eclipsed the other things you mention. Don't misread my point. The human mind needs creative stimulation, TV objectively provides that, despite you think somehow writing a novel is a more creative endeavour than writing and directing a screenplay.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dryeo ( 100693 )

          It goes back to the invention of fire. People needed something to pass the time after spending 25% of their waking time meeting their needs and sitting around staring at the fire with story telling passed the time. Story telling is what makes us human as sitting around trading stories about the lion at the water hole taught being careful getting a drink. Story telling societies survived to tell more stories.
          It's only since the industrial revolution that people have been short on time and this idea that doin

    • Our society is owned and operated by those who cannot govern themselves, IMHO we need to start there.

  • Rougly 8X what BEVs use (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DDumitru ( 692803 ) <doug&easyco,com> on Saturday February 03, 2024 @02:17PM (#64211054) Homepage
    Based on some quick searches, if all cars were BEV, then 27% of the grid would be needed to charge them. In that less than 1% of registered vehicles are BEVs, the BEV usage should be somewhere around 0.3% of the grid.

    I actually think that crypto mining is fine. Just restrict it's energy to times where the grid is in "curtailment". I am happy to heat up their GPUs with power that would otherwise be thrown away. Otherwise, their power use increases the electricity cost for everyone else.

    • Good thing BEV's will transition into the grid over decades.

      Also to accurately account for that 27% it needs to factored in how much of the energy we produce actually just goes right back into extracting, refining and transporting said fossil fuels, which is a not insignificant amount in fact that alone may be higher than the 27%. Also not to be forgotten is that transportation is still overwhelming fossil fuel based and accounts for 25% of energy demand and with the heat losses of things like ICE means we

      • Re:Rougly 8X what BEVs use (Score:5, Insightful)

        by DDumitru ( 692803 ) <doug&easyco,com> on Saturday February 03, 2024 @03:09PM (#64211172) Homepage
        crypto miners do the opposite. They sit on the Texas grid and expect to get paid for not using power during shortages. The ultimate in an incentive system that has not been thought thru.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jvkjvk ( 102057 )

          However, the crypto miners could have been making money from the power that *they contracted to*. I'm sure that they should have made money by just ignoring and minting crypto? They are in this to *make money*. They had a contract for the electricity. They deserve compensation for their lost profit.

    • Re:Rougly 8X what BEVs use (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Saturday February 03, 2024 @03:09PM (#64211170)

      I'm not ok with it. It isn't fine.

      Crypto literally does nothing of value and serves no purpose. I'd rather we throw away the extra energy than build huge data centers full of hardware that had to be built, shipped, installed, maintained, cooled and then later disposed of to do literally nothing useful.

    • If they can pay for the power and pay for the necessary grid upgrades then what's the problem? Most modern BTC mining operations are highly-centralized server-farm-like environments. Some of them use local power generations and don't even operate on the grid except as a backup or what have you.

  • As a method of payment it make senses, and the blockchain has been something good to come of it. But the proof of work and the power consumption that goes with it is truly bad news.

    There are ways you can justify it but when you dig into them they really aren't good. In my case I have more solar generation that the local grid can handle, up to 4kW at peak. The real solution is to improve the grid and or find a way to store more of the unusable power cheaply. So I was looking at what to use my surplus p

    • As a method of payment it make senses, and the blockchain has been something good to come of it.

      No it doesn't it doesn't really offer anything over a traditional ledger and database as "traditional" payment processors use, Visa alone completes like almost 500k every second of every day for minuscule amounts of energy comparably.

      This is self evident in that blockchain isn't new anymore, in fact as far as technology goes it's actually getting to be pretty old hat and we still have no good examples of it being used to supplant a tech that it was able to perform better than, every use of it I see is usual

  • Over 2.4% of our energy goes to video games: https://link.springer.com/arti... [springer.com]

    You won't see propaganda attacking video games' energy consumption, not when video games can greatly influence content narratives and stories to train a whole generation to think and vote a certain way.

    People who are obsessed with how computers are used only bellow cryptocurrency mining are typically censors and authoritarians.

    • Video games have entertainment value people use to lower their stress levels and sometimes as a social outlet.

      Crypto does nothing. It serves no purpose.

      I have never changed my vote based on the plot line from a Halo game. *eye roll*

      Does d&d make kids worship Satan, too?

    • Okay great, now do 60" TVs and other luxury entertainment devices.

  • The message I get here is simply (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Saturday February 03, 2024 @03:04PM (#64211146)

    Power is too cheap.

    • Power is too cheap.

      I'm quite certain that will never be a thing. Power can never get too cheap. Too cheap for what?

    • Power is too cheap.

      Only for certain sectors. I am charged a princely sum for my usage of electricity.

  • > These are almost certainly fossil fuel plants

    Wow, a whole rant of an article based on a strawman when the author could have read the economist St. Onge's detailed analysis instead.

    And found that the supermajority is underutilized renewables.

    But don't let that stop clicks.

  • From The Fine Article

    Our preliminary estimates suggest that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption.

    So they estimate 1.45% plus or minus 0.85%. That's crytocurrency in general, not bitcoin specifically, and under 2%, not over.

    The methodology used in the CBECI is based on a hybrid top-down approach that builds a basket of real-world hardware, which represents a typical mining unit,

    I.e. Poor methodology.

    with an underlying assumption that mining participants awarded Bitcoin are rational economic agents.

    I suspect it goes even further downhill from here, but that's as much as I could withstand reading.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by evanh ( 627108 )

      It does say mining specifically. With Ethereum out of the mining business, Bitcoin is the only one of significance remaining.

      • There are a few other ASIC coins out there like BTC, but BTC is by far the king. And then there's the CPU coins, which are negligible in power scale compared to BTC. There are some dGPU farms left, but not nearly as many as there were in the Ethereum PoW days.

  • Assuming crypto-payments were going to be the future, I wonder how this compares to the energy cost of making regular coins and paper money and credit card transactions.

  • And they pay nothing in Texas (Score:3)

    by laughingskeptic ( 1004414 ) on Saturday February 03, 2024 @04:41PM (#64211372)
    The credits bitcoin miners receive for turning off during Texas' frequent grid crises just about balance out their bill for the rest of year since ERCOT gives credits at the emergency pricing rates for voluntary disconnects under commercial contracts.

  • Is the so-called docs.

    It's an absolutely tangled mess of outdated and wrong information, 50 Page forum posts you have to digest completely, and "experts" who wonder why you aren't using the latest nightly build from some guy you don't know, vs. the latest 10-yo "official" build.

    I'm not a noob with DD-WRT. Used it extensively for a couple decades. It's capable, if buggy. But its time is seriously past. It's unfriendly, haphazardly maintained, and whatever was designed into the UI might just mean the opposite

  • Some of the coin goes to funding politicians who pass laws that make it more difficult to regulate Bitcoin mining. Like that community in Arkansas where residents cannot sleep due to 24/7 whining of a bitcoin data center.

    In the name of protecting liberty, these politicians force hundreds or thousands of poorly governed communities to pass and enforce new regulations and local laws. These local laws are much easier for the bitcoin investors to oppose.

  • Who is to say what kind of energy use is wasteful? It is certainly implied that Bitcoin is some waste of energy.

    What defines some energy use that is wasteful? Is setting my thermostat "too high" wasteful? I'm a bit "cold blooded" so I like my house warmer than most. In the summer I'll set the thermostat to 80F to 82F, so long as the A/C keeps the humidity low enough then I'm usually fine with it fairly warm. Now that there is snow on the ground I'll set the thermostat lower but likely still likely on t

  • Problems and solutions (Score:3)

    by zeeky boogy doog ( 8381659 ) on Sunday February 04, 2024 @12:08AM (#64212004)
    Problem: "CO2 is driving climate change!"
    Solution: "Okay, let's move towards not burning dead dinosaurs."
    Problem: "Let's use the energy consumption of a medium size country to invent a new kind of fake money."
    Solution: "..."
  • if they weren't so noisy. Seems like there should be a market for computing that heats your home, business, factory, town. Could do LLM training computation, graphics rendering for movies, biochem analysis, and more. The noise is an issue though.

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