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Comment by epinephrinios | Hacker News Reader

It would be great if the gigantic Bitcoin energy demand leads to renewable energy breakthroughs.

... do we really need another energy demand to drive R&D? We're already working with an energy budget equivalent to 1/3 the decay that powers the Earth's fiery core. Is it really fair to credit any new breakthroughs to the last ~12 GW of demand, instead of the first ~18 TW?

You seem to be asking that rhetorically with the implication that the answer is obvious “no.” But that’s certainly not obvious to me. Seems to me that adding energy demand is a good thing for the advancement of renewable energy. Surely a decrease or stasis in energy demand would be devastating to the renewable energy industry.

Yes, building more solar panels and and batteries gives the industry more experience at doing so, which (for a time) will allow it to refine the tech through multiple iterations, making future capacity cheaper and better-quality.

EDIT: this is to say, renewable tech production is still following a learning curve (https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth)

We have plenty of work to do just replacing existing power generation with renewables, so it's not clear to me how additional demand accelerates such replacement.

(This is in answer to both you and tshaddox.)

It's faster and cheaper to build out new capacity and then later retire old capacity than it is to do an in-situ replacement. Build the battery-backed solar and wind farms now, and then watch the coal and gas plants go bankrupt.

Then bitcoin miners will buy the old coal plants and we are back to square one

Not if you make coal-fired plants illegal to operate. Easy to enforce, since you can see the CO2 emissions and just go seize and demolish the plant if it turns on. Can also seize the coal mines.

This will have to happen regardless of whether or not cryptocurrency exists.

Incentives are aligned, imo

Could Bitcoin really bootstrap ourselves up the Kardashev scale? Amazing story.

Please put tulip bubble in new context.

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