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The carbon footprint of the Bitcoin network is decreasing
All the attention from mass media has motivated Bitcoin miners to make a greener world and attempt to decrease their carbon output.
CoinDesk recently did a report on a small Northern Italian community using hydropower to mine Bitcoin.
“The northern Italian regions bordering the snowy Alps are home to dozens of hydroelectric power plants in a range of sizes, thanks to the abundance of water” – Daniele Graziadei, the mayor of Borgo d’Anaunia, a small town in northern Italy, entered the 100-year-old Alta Novella hydropower plant with ease. - CoinDesk
This year, Borgo d’Anaunia, population around 2,500 people, became Italy’s first town to run a bitcoin mining center.
Another Swedish village has been using mining rigs too.
Around 15,000 bitcoin mining rigs are humming away at HIVE Blockchain’s 30 megawatt data center in Boden, Sweden. But sometimes, the facility powers down to help the local grid.
The data center, drawing cheap energy from local hydropower producers, is one of the largest active energy reserves the Swedish grid can call upon whenever there are major disturbances to the local power supply. The facility can shut down its machines almost instantaneously so that energy can quickly be diverted to public use.
It now seems to be the case that Bitcoin miners are not just decreasing their carbon footprint, but helping local power grids too.
Full disclosure, this could be even easier with the advent of DAOs into the scene. Once community-run DAOs become more common, people could actually vote for what will benefit them, rather than be stuck with the choices made by centralized corportations. Some DAOs like the Alps foundation, provide a new world for users all around trying to get the best of all these worlds. DeFi, DAOs, NFTs and Crypto will make the future greener and better.
The benefits between energy producers and Bitcoin miners are so aligned that soon it might be difficult to see the difference between the two.
More energy producers are entering mining, while miners are accumulating their own energy supply.
Energy companies that stay out of bitcoin mining will leave a lot of money on the table, because mining is much more profitable than selling the energy to the grid. A combination of the two is likely the future.
https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/miningweek/2022/03/25/how-northern-italian-hydropower-producers-became-bitcoin-miners/?outputType=amp
