Honestly, PoW seems like a big problem but the reality is that miners have been boosting the solar companies. Solar is cheaper than most other power sources and any miner will tell you that the cheaper the power the more profit they make.
All else being equal, building solar panels is a negative; producing and transporting solar panels consumes materials and produces CO2. The reason building solar power plants is usually good is that they reduce the need for even worse forms of energy production. If you build a solar farm, just to waste all or most of the energy it generates, what you have done is a net negative for the environment.
This is in addition to the fact that a whole lot of mining uses existing infrastructure, which negates the gains from building out clean energy and keeps demand high enough to require dirty energy, as /u/oofbey covered.
1. We build 1TW of solar panels, PoW mining uses that 1TW to do useless work.
2. We don't build 1TW of solar panels, and don't do that additional 1TW of useless work.
Worlds 1 and 2 have the same impact on the electricity grid. But in world 1, we're emitting a whole lot of CO2 and consuming a whole lot of rare materials to build solar farms and electronics, while in world 2 we don't. Clearly world 2 is better for the environment?
If solar happens to not be cheap, very sustained, increased demand for non-solar sources increases the likelihood of non-solar success.
> All else being equal, building solar panels is a negative; producing and transporting solar panels consumes materials and produces CO2. The reason building solar power plants is usually good is that they reduce the need for even worse forms of energy production. If you build a solar farm, just to waste all or most of the energy it generates, what you have done is a net negative for the environment.
I agree with this in the short term, but my argument is more about economies of scale: The more people want large amounts of solar, the better companies get at producing it and the cheaper it gets. Because of that cheapness fossil fuels could be taken off the table completely resulting in a short-term downside (losing resources and producing CO2 for unnecessary computations), but a long-term win (a world free from fossil fuels)
> This is in addition to the fact that a whole lot of mining uses existing infrastructure, which negates the gains from building out clean energy and keeps demand high enough to require dirty energy, as /u/oofbey covered.
Fair. Just because miners in general are ravenous for solar does not mean that all individual miners are able or willing to use solar “off the grid”. I’m not saying it’s perfect or that PoW is the right direction, I’m only pointing out that it’s not the absolute evil that it’s been painted as.
1) remote setup, or
2) tax incentives.
Also, green accountants may want to account for solar panel e-waste disposal in a about twenty years.