Energy Usage, Part 2: The Growth of Renewables and the Stubborn Persistence of Fossil Fuels
Professor Emeritus Guy R. McPherson continues discussing deep time with Niall Shephard. In this episode, we consider the persistence of fossil fuels.
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"It is what it is" neatly sums it up.
Asking us to conserve is so passe.
Alrighty then ...
Thanks again you two for continuing to inform.
Respect!
Starting at the 4:52 mark of this presentation a graph is shown – “Fast-growing technologies drive electricity demand”. It shows that one of the fastest growing segments is Data Centers. This is, thanks in large part, because of AI generation. But the chart fails to show the other area that is growing just as fast – cryptocurrencies’ mining. In a segment about AI and cryptocurrencies, electricity demands, and nuclear power – which is now being discussed at COP29 – DemocracyNow! contacted Alex de Vries, who studies the sustainability of emerging technologies at the VU Amsterdam University. He’s the founder of Digiconomist, a research company dedicated to exposing the unintended consequences of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. De Vries talks about AI and ChatGPT, their incredible growth and constant need for electricity. But cryptocurrencies are also using huge amounts of electricity as these currencies become more popular. De Vries found that one bitcoin transaction consumes as much energy as the average American household does in a day. He also found that bitcoin is responsible for more than 95% of the carbon footprint of all cryptocurrencies.
“Bitcoin uses the very specific mining process where, in order to create a new block for the underlying blockchain, a new block of transactions, everyone in the bitcoin network has to participate in what I like to describe as a massive game of guess the number, whereas the whole network is making an insane amount of calculations every second of the day, 600 quintillion attempts — it’s like 600 with 18 zeros — every second of the day, nonstop. ... These miners are earning up to or more than $10 billion a year from this process. But, of course, they are also spending a huge amount of money on the energy to participate in this process, and nowadays actually more than entire countries, like Sweden and Argentina, just for mining bitcoin. But other cryptocurrencies, they use other types of algorithms, so those algorithms are not dependent on computational effort. This is why bitcoin is kind of the only big cryptocurrency left standing today which still uses the extremely energy-intensive mining.”
De Vries goes on to talk about the pros and cons of using nuclear power to provide the electricity for AI, cryptocurrencies, and other new tech endeavors. I hope that cryptocurrency mining is included in your chart. I think it merits a separate category. You can find the interview with de Vries here:
Massive Energy Needs of AI & Cryptocurrencies Lead Amazon, Google & Microsoft to Embrace Nuclear Power https://www.democracynow.org/2024/11/19/cop29_nuclear_power