Something on the lines of if your company facility is using over X amount of energy the majority of that has to be from a green source such as solar power. What would happen and is this feasible or am I totally thinking about this wrong
Edit: Good responses from everyone, my point in asking this was completely hypothetical, ignoring how hard it would be to implement a restriction. My own thoughts are that requiring the use of renewable energy for high electricity products could help spur the demand for it as now it’s a requirement. Of course companies would fight back, they want money
Green energy is still not free energy.
Every amout of green energy a crypto miner uses is less green energy for everything else. You take 3% (country consumption) of capacity from the green grid, you must up at least 3% the production in existing coal plants.
A law in which country? What would you do if someone in a different country doesn’t want to follow that?
just ask the president of the world nicely to make the rule
Would be nice, but we haven’t yet achieved global unity.
Then miners would siphon off renewable energy and other more polluting sources would be used to power the remainder.
They’re not gonna build more green power supply just to help out crypto miners.
They would if we cut them off from the grid. All Bitcoin does now is raise electricity bills. Let them build solar farms and buy batteries if they insist on mining something useless to 99% of humanity.
You think these clowns are going to build anything? They’re just leeches trying to make money by doing nothing other than letting computers run.
No, but crypto miners could fund a boom in green energy industry if they bought their own panels, wind turbines, battery banks, etc.
They could. But they won’t.
You think a bunch of people Mining crypto for greed are gonna altruistically buy green energy?
Not altruistically, but if laws were made and enforced to where green energy was the most financially rewarding way to power their mining rigs, they’d do it.
If you mean their own green energy that they have to buy, set up, and maintain on their own, then sure. Force them off grid and bring enormous financial consequences if they pollute to make their energy
They would just set up in Kazakhstan or something. How does that help? There’s no way everyone in the world passes the same law
Problem is energy from the grid is just energy. You’d get crypto companies buying “green” energy leaving the dirty enegery for everyone else. It’d be meaningless.
Ultimately crypto mining is a pointless industry. It benefits the miners financially but doesn’t produce anything meaningful, while expending huge amounts of energy and polluting the world as a result. It’s also an extremely energy wasteful way to run the infrastructure needed to maintain crypto currencies.
It wouldn’t matter if we were in some Nuclear fusion powered utopia with an abundance of energy. But we’re not - we’re in the middle of a climate crisis and desperately trying to move over to green energy. Growing demands for energy for crypto is countering that.
The real solution is to tax crypto mining - for example tax then on every kWh they use. Regions that entice crypto operations in are chasing fools gold - the costs out weight any local economic benefits of new data centres being built.
While being right about crypto being meaningless for some people (I guess there are people valuing hope in decentralized monetary system, even if it is misplaced.), you failed to mention that most of other industries are equally meaningless and good part of them are even harmful: fashion, fast food, industrial food, banking - in a way we have it, cars in current form(no need for this huge tanks)…
In comparation crypto is just wasteful and isn’t harming anyone.
It is a waste of energy either way which could have been used for actual useful purposes. So no, that is not a helpful solution.
Like a carbon tax? We’ve been talking about that for years.
It could help a bit, but I think then there would just be less green energy available for the other applications.
They would get around that with green washing the way a lot of companies are these days.
It all depends on the details, but power is a local produced good and is not something that can be escaped with laws that want to stop carbon emissions.
You say that like the laws we have right now against carbon emissions are working. I get what you’re saying but the laws probably need a re-write.
The current laws most certainly do not work. The fact that they don’t work is a willing failure on the part of the lawmakers.
Why not use that energy for something useful?
Generally speaking, pollution etc. is what economists call “external cost”. It should be penalized in some way, and the usual tool is taxation. It’s not just AI and Crypto that should pay for non-green energy, but everyone. It’s massively simpler that way too, and massively simpler = harder to circumvent and manipulate.
Simplicity’s bad side in this is that it’s difficult to slap a “correct price” on pollution. I.e. difficult to calculate how much actual damage they’re causing.
In actual world, thanks to rampant corporatism and other forms of fuckery, what we’re actually doing is subsidizing these fuels, which is of course completely ass-backwards. Just removing the subsidies would already help a lot, but actually penalizing those energy forms even just a little would be huge.
Why not just pass a law that no one can generate electricity except from green sources? It sounds so easy when I put it like that.
Are you thinking that sprinkling the buzzwords “AI” and “Crypto” on an “only green energy” kind of provision would allow lawmakers to leverage hype to cut through right-wing resistence to green energy mandates in a way that a more blanket (or even just not-Crypto/AI-focused) provision couldn’t?
Why not just pass a law that no one can generate electricity except from green sources? It sounds so easy when I put it like that.
Um - those laws have been passed in many countries. Usually with a reasonable approach such as “you can continue operating the coal plants that were already built, but no more can be built”.
What’s actually happening around the world though is those plants are becoming too expensive to run, so they’re shutting down even if they are allowed to continue to operate. Renewable power is just cheaper.
About two thirds of global electricity production is zero emission now and it’ll be around 95% in a 25 years or so.
Source (note: this is a “renewables” article, not a “zero emission” article. Some non-renewable energy produces zero emissions and there’s not expected to be much movement on that in the foreseeable future): https://renewablesnow.com/news/renewables-produce-85-of-global-power-nearly-50-of-energy-in-2050-582235/
Um - those laws have been passed in many countries.
Yeah, I know. I just wondered what putting a “but only for AI and crypto applications” as OP said added to the conversation.
In civilized places, e.g. not the U.S. (it’s cool, I’m American), where it’s not a struggle to get any environmental legislation passed, adding “AI and crypto” to the conversation is unnecessary. In the U.S. where the minority of conspiracy theorists get what they want through cheating, I doubt adding AI and crypto to the conversation is going to help any.
Force this unnecessary tech bullshit to invest in becoming self-sufficient through green energy
Too much
T - double O. It’s a different word.
Although “so much” would probably be a better fit anyway
I actually meant to say so instead of to, but it ended up working out
Fair enough. I didn’t assume that because S & T are separated on the keyboard. Autocorrect can do weird stuff though.
Fixed it
There is no such thing as “green” energy, all energy has an environmental extraction/capture cost. Crypto has insane per user power usage, AI isn’t quite as bad but it’s still much higher than normal websearch. Both should be used sparingly in cases where they actually make sense.
