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Because AI and Crypto use so much electricity, what if a law was made that they had to power it with green energy? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (12 children)

Just to expand on this, While eth is 99.99% less energy use than Bitcoin, it still added 2.8 kilotonnes of co2 last year which is equal to about 2000 average houses for a year.

It's a negligible amount in the scheme of things, but a lot for a virtual currency especially when you add up all the various cryptocurrencies out there.

It wouldn't hurt to make all the POS ones use green energy, but probably wouldn't impact anything by itself.

Changing Bitcoin to green energy alone probably would however.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Why is it "a lot for a virtual currency?" What's the typical energy usage of a virtual currency?

In 2019 Visa used 740,000 gigajoules of energy, which is equivalent to 6727 households (google dug up a figure of 110 Gj/year for that). So this really doesn't seem like a lot for this kind of thing.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

And that's just Visa.

https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/data/2012/c&e/cfm/pba4.php

That lists the energy usage of banking and financial office space to be 18 billion kWh, or 64.8 petajoules. (About 87x that Visa figure.)

And even that is just office space. Doesn't factor in the manufacture, distribution, transport, storage, and disposal of physical money, or any other associated costs.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago

On the flip side, global banking processes something like 5+ orders of magnitude more transactions than ETH, so even at the low end it’s 1000x more efficient than the most well known POS coin.

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