I haven't checked on this in a while, but the most energy intensive portion of overall production seemed to be the treatment of batteries during their production. Development for an alternative to the current treatment process to use significantly less energy seemed promising
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electr...
There are numerous reasons for this. One is that oil drilling, shipping, and refining is dirty and uses a ton of energy. Another is that large heat engines are often many times more efficient than small ones. A huge 100+ megawatt steam turbine at a coal plant is going to have 2-3X the thermal efficiency of a small ICE in a car, especially if it's a newer or recently upgraded supercritical steam system.
I recall reading that CO2/mile for a coal powered EV is typically similar to driving a high efficiency hybrid gasoline car like a Prius, but I can't find the reference right now.
No, that's not even close to being correct, the most efficient Prius model you can currently buy supposedly only emits 75g per km.
Tesla Model 3 consumes 14.9 kWh per 100 km, coal plants in the US on average emit ~1kg of CO2 per kWh. The energy loss between the power plant and consumer seems to be between 8 and 15%. So using 8% it's 160g of CO2 per km. I'm not sure if the data reported by Tesla accounts for charger efficiency (which is at maximum 92% and might be as low as 70-80% if you're charging at home) if not that would at least another 8% making it 173g per km or more.
Even a very efficient petrol car like for example WV Golf Rr 1.5 TSI is quite a bit lower than that at 116g per km.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
Switching to Natural gas would decrease CO2 per kWH more than twice, from 1kg to 0.41 kg per kWh would make Model 3 about even with the Prius (71 vs 75 g per km).
What about paying someone with cash, or gold?
You could even send cash in the mail. It would still use less energy than Bitcoin...
Are you sure? What's the energy use of sending $1000 cash in the mail from the US to France?
> If you want to transfer money and the recipient is closer than 660 miles from you it's more efficient to just get a bunch of bills, drive there with a Tesla rather than send a Bitcoin transaction. Or alternatively 330 miles roundtrip. For each single transaction.
France is further than 660 miles from the US, and airplanes use more energy than electric cars. However, letters are also shipped in bulk, dramatically cutting down on the energy use of an individual parcel.
So, yes, even though I don't currently have the inclination to calculate the energy use of sending a letter to France, I am very confident it would be more efficient than sending Bitcoin.
Carbon cost is apparently about 986 kg/passenger, based on average passenger weight of 60kg, so for a 0.5kg bundle of cash, that would be approximately 986/120 = 8.2kg of carbon to send a bundle of cash from NY to Paris, assuming it travels in the cargo hold.
Would be interesting to see it sourced/researched properly, but at first glance I'd say that, yes, it is much more efficient to send a letter, even if you drive to the mail box.
Sort of. What you say is true because the energy spent on mining is in equilibrium with the value of the Bitcoin produced by the miners (both the block reward and transaction fees). As the value of Bitcoin goes up, so does the energy they're prepared to buy to mine it.
As the block reward halves, the profitability of mining declines, and so does the energy miners are prepared to buy to mine it (otherwise they make losses).
The final equilibrium will be reached when the block reward goes to zero. At that point it'll be down to transaction fees only, which is proportional to transaction demand. If there's pressure there, then people will be incentivized to transact off-chain and use the chain for clearance only.
In the meantime, the energy spent (in fiat currency) is primarily a function of 1) block reward size; and 2) BTC value.
What's interesting about this is that the block reward schedule is fixed, but BTC value isn't. The energy "burned" is a consequence of Bitcoin's success - it's the area between the two curves. But had the block reward schedule tapered off faster, then Bitcoin might not have successfully bootstrapped at all.
The other interesting aspect is that the block reward, being inflationary, produces downward pressure on Bitcoin's value. It's the upward pressure (whatever its source) that is exceeding this that is creating the energy consumption (since energy consumption is proportional to BTC value, as above).
Surely the reversibility of transactions by a trusted, appointed authority is a feature, not a bug. It's an important safeguard against fraud, money laundering, etc. I've never heard of it being abused, while cryptocurrencies are (so far) a paradise for fraudsters and launderers.
Where I live we had large scale state capture for years. A pivotal moment in clipping the kingpins' wings was when all of the South African banks simultaneously cut off their banking in 2016. That was a good day, now we only have medium scale state capture.
Similar to how no one says we shouldn’t have encrypted web traffic because sometimes you want to see the raw message, you don’t need to weaken the protocol to solve a higher up issue.
Edit: Well, at least that is what my impression was. DoE has a paper on this. The example numbers used in this paper seem typical from me taking a brief look at power plant and EV efficiency. I thought the extra energy conversion steps added up to more than 20% thermodynamic efficiency loss. I was wrong.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2000-06-12/pdf/00-144...
Isn't that the same as a Tesla opting to potentially emit carbon at a centralized power plant? Bitcoin rigs don't burn gasoline directly, but rely on whatever source of power is available at their location. Bitcoin does waste a lot of energy, hopefully we can draw from cleaner sources in the long-run to operate it (and find ways to move Bitcoin off of proof-of-work).
UPCO2 is a new token from Uphold.com, and BTC0 is Bitcoin backed by UPCO2 tokens to offset carbon emissions. Using these crypto assets is one way to offset carbon while still using Crypto.
Let's assume that switching to electric does not, itself, cause an increase in total cars on the road. Let's also assume that both ICE and electric vehicles require roughly equal amounts of energy to travel equivalent distances (this is probably not true, but helps in the analysis). The tradeoff between an ICE or electric vehicle, then, is which produces more carbon emissions for the same amount of energy: the gas/diesel combustion engine or the power plant?
If the plant is more efficient, converting to electric vehicles will produce a net reduction globally, but a net increase locally (at the power plant) in carbon emissions.
If it's equal, then we just shift the source of emissions to the power plants.
If plant is less efficient, then there will be a global increase. This is the worst case, it's also not the likely case.
This gets improved later with the ability to switch to cleaner energy production methods than burning oil, coal, or natural gas. This is not an option if we remain with ICE vehicles, we can't put a wind turbine on them or a nuclear reactor.
BTC doesn't trade anything, it just increases energy consumption (and therefore production). In the near term, at least, BTC will increase carbon emissions because that's how most energy is produced. Not just exchange the location of emissions. BTC isn't replacing oil burning bank ledgers. It's just consuming orders of magnitude more energy to do a similar job.
I bicycle commute to and from work (before the quarantines, and now I'm moving to 100% WFH), as well to get groceries and other errands around town. The big vehicle is for weekend adventures.
;)
[more seriously, I wonder what percentage of USD currency is physical vs an entry in a database]
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MABMM301USM189S [2] https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12773.htm M3 more info https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/m3.asp
Does printing/minting physical money not have a carbon footprint? What about transporting it everywhere?
Printing a $100 bill costs 20 cents according to [1]. I don't think there is a meaningful way to produce 300 kg of CO2 by spending 20 cents, even if that was all you were trying to do. And then consider that a bill sees on the order of 100 reuses (and coins live significantly longer).
Transportation is far harder to estimate, but unless you're driving hundreds of miles for each (average) transaction, you're not going to get anywhere near 300 kg, as road vehicles are in the ballpark of 20 kg CO2 per 100 km.
So no, CO2 impact of physical money is orders of magnitude below bitcoin. Bitcoin is not remotely offsetting anything there.
To put this in perspective, Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as Argentina (a country with tens of millions of residents), about 121 TWh/year, but for all that energy the network only processes 4-7 transactions per second. Visa processes an average of 1700 transactions per second on its own, and is just one of many large payment processors in the mainstream financial system. Visa's 2018 report (first thing I found on Google) stated a consumption of about 720000GJ, which is 0.1TWh. That is a massive difference, so if cash was anything as energy-intensive as Bitcoin the banks would have figured it out by now and ditched it to save a ton of money (keeping in mind that banks account for the bulk of the overhead spent on cash and coins).
Significantly less than cryptocurrency, and it handles more than a million concurrent transactions every second, with capacity to handle loads in the tens of millions of transactions per second.
Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions for second, and requires more electricity than a small country to do so.
I mentioned the other day that "one of the bad things" about Bitcoin was that it consumed the energy equiv of Ireland.
Then heard yesterday that it's up to Argentina.
Sounded like order of mag change, and yep—🇮🇪 is about to again surpass 5M people, 🇦🇷 approaching 45M. Almost into top 30 countries.
[1] https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate-responsibil...
Incidentally, that 2nd article mentions that this is equivalent to the power used by inactive-but-on electronic devices in US households alone.
I guess PC gaming was at 75TWh 5 years ago [2], so I'm not going to worry too much yet.
[0] http://climatestate.com/2018/01/15/energy-consumption-bitcoi...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2015/09/07/the-...
Since energy consumption has historically always increased and since it drives all of human progress and innovation I'm not convinced that the demand side is where we should focus on solving our problems.
I think another point to note is that Bitcoin (and Crypto/DeFi in general) is really just a censorship resistant Casino, and I say this having worked in blockchain and crypto for the last 6 years. As such, the massive electricity usage is all the more egregious.
On the other hand. Banks actually add a lot of value whether we care to admit it or not. They provide a working payment network. They provide credit when you need it etc. Yes, the banking infrastructure probably uses a lot of electricity too - somehow those mainframes need to be powered but I'd like to think we can all agree that society benefits from this. Where as, with Bitcoin, only a small few benefit but the cost of running the infrastructure is so high.
Maybe a better comparison is how much energy the gold industry uses vs bitcoin mining?
Visa, Mastercard, Unionpay, SEPA each settle more than 100 billion transactions per year, bitcoin has less than 0.2 billion transactions per year. Currently bitcoin consumes something like 0.25% of world's electricity for much less than 0.25% of world's transactions, so if we processed all transactions this wastefully, it wouldn't be enough to divert all the power production in the world to do so.
Abandoning cars after a few years is far worse to the environment.
(Yes I know, most of the materials of a car will be recycled. But it's just another expression of our throwaway/can't fix that culture).
I wish it was that easy of a choice. Pre-COVID, using public transit would have made my daily commute (one-way) between 1.5 and 2 hours, compared to 20-30 minutes by car.
And where I live, we've been paying hundreds-thousands of dollars on each car registration renewal (% of the car's estimated value) for that new transit system, which might not even get used that much post-COVID because of the germophobia that inflicted society.
With a breakthrough in energy storage technology e.g. solid state, this issue might go away, but right now it compels the production of vehicles specifically designed to be EV and relegates retrofitting to a hobbyist discipline providing relatively disappointing results in range and/or handling.
For retrofitting, locating some batteries in the engine bay is possible. This seems to be avoided by ev manufacturers in favour of locating a monolithic battery pack under the passenger compartment, for weight distribution, simplicity, and (I assume) safety reasons.
Physically swappable battery packs isn’t feasible because of the sheer weight of the packs (a leaf 40k pack for example is 210kg). Plus each car manufacturer has different specs and shape packs. Fortunately we already have a completely fungible, extremely portable unit that can be hot-swapped into every EV at nearly any location just like petrol - a kWh of electricity. Today it takes a bit of time to fast charge, but again with visible-on-the-horizon breakthroughs in battery tech e.g. solid state, fast charge times could drop from ~30 minutes to 3.
Swappable battery packs clearly wouldn't be a single piece, as there are going to be a variety of different bays and sizes. They'd need to be smaller, portable, and stackable, like rectangles or hexagons. It's not really that hard to do if you design for it. If the batteries are under the car then a lift or underground bay you drive onto is fairly easy to do. Or you could just have a kind of dolly that slides under the car and can detach/reattach them.
The fact that we never really thought in this direction seems like a blind spot. I mean, look at how pit crews for racing work. The whole car is designed to be swappable in seconds flat, and also for minimum weight and maximum speed. It's just engineering and design investment.
As for the tradeoff of new EV versus used ICE, the numbers in the video seemed to suggest to me that it's still in favor of EVs, just that the break even point is farther out. Other sources have run the numbers to show it's not the construction or EOL that is the largest factor in emissions, it's the actual use: https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8
It's really clear that EV's are just the better option for the environment. The only thing that beats them is public/mass transit or human powered (walking, cycling) transportation.