Important facts:
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39% of the banking sector uses clean energy, compared to 52% for bitcoin mining.
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Bitcoin mining has seen more renewable energy use than other industries.
Bitcoin mining is now the industrial sector that consumes the most energy from renewable sources. This is according to a report published by researcher and analyst Daniel Batten on website Batcoinz.com.
He Article de Batten states that from today 52.6% of the Bitcoin mining industry is powered by clean energy. Additionally, the use of this type of energy by miners increased by 38% between July 2019 and June 2023. This puts Bitcoin mining at the top of these statistics compared to other sectors of the economy.
When it comes to using renewable energy, banking is Bitcoin mining’s biggest competitor. According to the Batten report, 39.2% of this sector uses renewable energy sources for its operations.
The researcher assumes that 100% of the energy consumed by banks worldwide comes from the traditional electricity grid, so assigned it the same values that are reflected globally.
Sectors such as industry, agriculture and gold, 32%, 19% and 12% rely on renewable energy sources respectively. While less than 10% of those involved in the iron, steel and zinc recycling industries use clean energy.
Criticism of the energy consumption of bitcoin mining
Bitcoin mining has been repeatedly criticized by environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and accused of being one of the main culprits in accelerating climate change in recent years.
At the time, CriptoNoticias reported on the launch of the “Cleanup Bitcoin” campaign (which translates to “Let’s clean Bitcoin” in Spanish). A Greenpeace initiative intended to bring about a change in the Bitcoin network’s consensus algorithm so that this cryptocurrency could not be mined.
Data mining is the mechanism used by the Proof of Work (PoW) to ensure the security of this network, as it allows verification that the transactions performed on it conform to the protocol. In addition, this mechanism allows the issuance of new coins.
The electric car manufacturer Tesla and its co-founder Elon Musk are also spokesmen for the slogan points out that Bitcoin mining is a high energy consumer made with fossil fuels.
In May 2021, Musk announced that Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin as payment, admitting to being “concerned” about the carbon footprint of bitcoin mining. However, Musk himself joined Michael Saylor this month to found the Bitcoin Green Mining Council.
Despite these kinds of remarks, the data presented by Batten in his report shows that Bitcoin mining has the potential to do so Promote the use of clean energyeven to a greater degree than other sectors of the industry.