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Comment by BlueTemplar | Hacker News Reader

Increasing demand for renewable energy - thrashing our planet ?

Every KwH spent on useless calculations could be better spent heating a home, lighting a room, smelting some ore, or literally anything productive.

Not totally true. As I pointed out in previous HN threads, there is a lot of power used by miners that would otherwise be unused. In the Chinese regions of Yunan and Sichuan, there is such an overcapacity of hydropower that dams are forced to release water (without spinning the turbines) which amounts to over 100 TWh wasted every year. So just these 2 regions let more hydropower go to literal waste than the worldwide consumption of Bitcoin miners.

Incidentally, this overcapacity is why some estimate that half the global Bitcoin mining capacity is located in Sichuan and Yunan. Despite that, they just make a tiny dent in the wasted hydropower...

I wonder why they don't use it to make synthetic gas.

Oh, they can heat rooms/homes alright!

Overheating rooms which then have to be ventilated / air conditioned and aren't even an efficient way to heat an area compared to heat pumps.

Heat pumps can be complicated to set up, and nobody forces you to overheat...

Also having to produce more solar panels and wind turbines to run miners is not good for the environment either.

It can - if it helps with the economies of scale, and makes us "get off" fossil fuels earlier.

Normal usage has already done this. New renewable energy sources are cheaper than new fossil fuel sources. Fossil fuels exist mainly today because they have already been set up but mostly for political reasons. Many political parties have built their personal brand around fossil fuels and will continue to use them even when it is illogical.

Not if you consider the intermittency/storage issues.

(And guess what - intermittency isn't a big deal for cryptomining / SETI/Folding@Home either!)

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