Solar panels give about 100 watts per square meters best case, practically you’ll be on half of that… With the amounts of electricity they use, they’ll need to cover entire nature reserves with solar panels to feed their miners. It’s simply not practical
darthfabulous42069@lemm.ee 4 months ago
You’d think with all of the money they’re pulling in, they’d invest in solar panels or something to lower their overhead.
Or am I making the mistake of approaching the situation with common sense?
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
zergtoshi@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Solar panels can have more than 200 watts peak per square meter and provide around 200 kWh per year and square meter, although these values vary a lot depending on where the panels are installed.
Given these numbers, generating 200 TWh annually (which is more than the current electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining devices) would require 10^9 square meters; that’s slightly more than 31 square kilometers.
Don’t misunderstand this as defending the electric energy consumption of Bitcoin mining! I’d rather see this electric energy being used elsewhere.
I merely wanted to show how much electric energy can be harvested using solar panels.Chriswild@lemmy.world 4 months ago
They’d still need some type of battery to make solar work though. They want to mine 24/7.
darthfabulous42069@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Wind turbines? Solar thermal? Nuclear in exchange for all of those Bitcoins, perhaps?
long_chicken_boat@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
they should be doing that, otherwise I don’t get how they are making any profit with those huge electricity bills. Last time I checked it, with electricity prices it wasn’t worth it to mine cryptocurrency.
orrk@lemmy.world 4 months ago
no, that’s the magic of speculative market financing
this_1_is_mine@lemmy.world 4 months ago
With how volatile the value of Bitcoin is I don’t know whether or not they feel safe trying to take that money and reinvest it you’re walking by one of the coin ATMs that’s at one of my local stores I’ve watched the value of Bitcoin halve its value than double it overnight basically every single day for the last 3 weeks
Huschke@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Maybe pay off would be so far into the future that they don’t want to risk it? Who knows how long crypto will be a thing.
darthfabulous42069@lemm.ee 4 months ago
You can get solar panels for like $100-$200 on Amazon right now. Nice ones. The price of them dropped like a fucking rock since China got involved.
Snekeyes@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Vs. Banks. That have offices, branches, atms, data centers… banking does use more energy yearly. So why not both invest in renewables
stoy@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
Sure, but how much of the global financial market does crypto represent?
I susptect that the energy consomption per transaction is considerably higher for crypto than for a normal financial transaction.
orrk@lemmy.world 4 months ago
no, it is exorbitantly higher for a single crypto transaction
stoy@lemmy.zip 4 months ago
I did find some information about this, and have posted about it in the thread, and you are absolutely right about this in regards to Bitcoin, I did not find a lot of information about other crypto apart from Etherium, which claimed that the energy use of one Etherium transaction would not consume any power at all, which I doubt.
darthfabulous42069@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I agree with you. That still means Bitcoin is on the hook though.
RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 4 months ago
It’s Bitcoin, of course common sense isn’t involved.
darthfabulous42069@lemm.ee 4 months ago
I mean, fair, but still. People should push them to go green.