Cryptocurrency mining will accelerate the transition to green energy

22.04.2021 | auglovoi

Experts from Square and ARK Invest conducted research on the reality of the Austin, Texas, alternative energy and cryptocurrency mining economy.

According to the results, the integration of industrial mining sites into the common electric grid has the potential to increase the share of energy mined from renewable sources. Experts came to these conclusions based on profitability indicators. Stable electricity consumption makes it possible to increase the profitability of solar panels and wind turbines up to 40%, which, in turn, will attract new capital to the industry.

The main disadvantage of solar power is “baseload consumption”. Given the high demand for electricity, existing capacity often becomes insufficient, but the construction of additional generation plants is unprofitable - with low demand, even the existing facilities produce too much, and the accumulation increases the cost of generation, making it economically unprofitable to develop solar energy.

However, no matter how optimistic the conclusions are, because the share of “green” energy in mining can be brought up to 99%, it will require the construction of scalable crypto-mining platforms. That is, when electricity consumption by classic users decreases, the surplus is transferred to mining, and vice versa, when there is a shortage of power it is shut down. There is also a disadvantage in this workflow - it will be difficult to predict, for example, the speed of transactions in the network. Hashrate will be floating, which means that the same transaction at different times may take different amount of time. This can be solved by distributing mining sites in different regions around the world.