This has become almost a religious belief amongst cryptocurrency acolytes, but it's simply not true.
--
Edit: please see my comment¹ and piplikoc's comment² below for more detail on this.
> The CCAF’s research finds that 76% of ‘hashers’ use renewable energy to power their activities, with hydropower the number one source at 62%. Wind and solar energy meanwhile are used by 17% and 15% respectively. This would appear to be consistent with previous research which estimates that 74% of bitcoins are mined using renewable energy. However, the CCAF’s report specifies that the 76% refers to the share of hashers who use renewable energy at any point. It estimates that only 39% of hashing’s total energy consumption comes from renewables. [1]
> Bitcoin, which is mostly mined with electricity from coal.[2]
> But most bitcoin mining facilities are located in China, which is still heavily reliant on coal-based power. Though the Chinese province of Sichuan is known to attract miners due to its cheap electricity and rich hydropower resources, the level of power generation capacity fluctuates depending on the season. [3]
[1] https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/36672/renewable-energy-...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952#piano-inline3:~....
[3] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/05/bitcoin-btc-surge-renews-wor....
Selection bias. I don't doubt that the miners who are investing god knows how much is necessary to _require a contractor_ will have scaled enough to need to concern themselves with cost of electricity, but the _majority_ of miners are not going to be those people, surely?
The small mining operations run by the common person has almost no impact in the scale of the network.
Everyone will look for cheapest power, but that on its own does not make it renewable.
Plus, regardless of your source, as long as you haven't built your own plant, the grid has to cover for the loss. If there isn't an abundance of renewable energy on the grid, then the operation wasn't neutral at all.
Miners were supposed to be everyday Joe’s.
Some of that may be hydro. A lot is coal.
Even when they do use green energy, the effect of doing that is to displace other users onto dirtier forms of energy, thus creating just as much pollution anyway.
Bitcoin is not green in any way whatsoever. Bitcoin specifically wastes energy, by design. This is never green. The first principle of green energy is to use less energy, as no energy is clean.
"Surplus energy" is another lie bitcoiners like to spread about this. Sure, there might be a few occasions where bitcoin mining might use surplus energy.
In the vast majority of cases, no, they are not doing that. That is just not a thing.
Also, it is wrong to assume that consuming 1GW near a hydroplant is fine. That 1GW would have been sold to someone else, and unless the net has an abundance of renewable energy, a non-renewable plant is going to have to cover for that.
The same market effects that apply to factories, research facilities, server farms, etc... also apply to cryptocurrency mining. We can't have our cake and eat it too -- if energy isn't fungible, then not every mining rig is going to be set up using the most efficient power source in the world. Not every miner is going to have the ability to just "choose" to use cheap renewable power, and if mining is still profitable where they are using the power sources available to them, then they're still going to do it.
True, it doesn't make sense to move the power all the way around the world, but that's also not really how things like the synchronous grid of Continental Europe works, where power is traded across 24 countries on a single grid.
If your have cheap renewable energy, when you start selling, excess non-renewable capacity and more expensive plants in general powers down in nearby areas and countries.
Any power taken from a renewable plant there when power price is positive means increased non-renewable output.
Both scenarios are very plausible, because if everyone within the market was perfectly efficient in choosing to use the cheapest power sources available, and if hydro was clearly the cheapest way to generate power, then it wouldn't just be being used for Bitcoin, it would be being used for every single portable, power-intensive task in general. We wouldn't be having a conversation about the environment in nearly any manufacturing field.
Given that this isn't happening, given that some things in the world still use coal power, and given that people are still worried about the environmnetal impacts of energy use in general, even though hydro exists -- the obvious conclusion is one of the following:
A) hydro isn't universally the cheapest power source.
B) there are other factors that determine where people will set up operations (taxes, living situation and preferred environment, costs beyond power generation, market saturation to the point that its still profitable to use expensive sources of power).
C) there are still environmental impacts of using a ton of power, even if it came from hydro, and hydro power doesn't just have zero environmental impact.
But obviously something is going on here, because bitcoin isn't special. If hydro power was the savior of power generation, then every single factory in the world would already be using it. But they're not, and it's reasonable to assume that the same market constraints and environmental situations also apply to bitcoin mining.
The fact that we are having an energy debate at all about any industry implies that something about the energy market, it's pricing, and its environmental impacts is more complicated than you're making it sound.
Then any "published study" on this topic is automatically going to be flawed as well?
Otherwise nonsense claims can easily destroy the discussion by DoSing the opposition.
Their research indicates that a minority of mining is done using renewable resources:
> The survey findings estimate that on average 39% of proof-of-work mining is powered by renewable energy, primarily hydroelectric energy.
It also specifically addresses this popular claim of mining being powered mostly by renewables:
> China’s oversupply of hydroelectric energy during the rainy season has often been used as evidence in claims that a vast majority of mining is powered by environment-friendly power sources. While it is true that the Chinese government’s strategy to ensure energy self-sufficiency has led to the development of massive hydropower capacity, the same strategy has driven public investments in the construction of large-scale coal mines. Like hydroelectric power plants, these coal power plants often generate surpluses. It should not come as a surprise then that a significant share of hashers in the region equally report using both hydropower and coal energy to power their operations.
A cursory Google search says the percentage of renewable energy in the US and China is ~11% and ~23% respectively. The disparity between that and an average of 39% for crypto mining specifically does not seem to be factored in.
> The great unanswered question faced when exploring cryptodamages is that while we can identify select geographic hotspots of production we currently do not know in the aggregate where the electricity used in cryptocurrency mining is physically produced. This is because we, like Krause and Tolaymat, do not know the physical locations of cryptocurrency miners, whether individuals, groups or aggregates in, say, a region or country. There is considerable evidence of concentration of mining operations in particular locations, typically where reliable electricity is cheaply available, though, precise data are lacking. In the US, perhaps the most well-known concentration is the Mid-Columbia Basin area in central and eastern Washington State, where cheap electricity is produced by hydropower along the Columbia River, however, mining in other US locations also occurs. There is also evidence of large mining camps in China. With time and emergent research there may be improved information about the amounts of electricity devoted to mining cryptocurrencies for particular locations or regions, but it is currently not available.
It would be interesting to see the results of their analysis if recalculated using the more granular CCAF survey data.