The New York Times recently published the results of its investigation into the environmental impact of Bitcoin in the United States and the various problems posed by the production of this virtual currency.
For a long time, bitcoin’s production plants were all located in China. But as of 2019, the country has decided to ban this cryptocurrency and factories have been relocated to various countries, such as Iran, Kazakhstan or the USA. Regardless of the country concerned, the power consumption of Bitcoin production plants is immense and puts the electricity grid under strain. In the United States, this concerns the power grids of the states that host these factories, such as Texas.
In February 2021, a particularly severe cold snap swept across the United States, including Texas, where 40 people froze to death in their homes. During this episode, the Bitcoin production plant installed near Austin used the equivalent of the electricity consumption of 6,500 homes. The United States is home to around thirty-four bitcoin-mining factories, representing the equivalent electricity consumption of three million Americans.
Bitcoin production plants consume a lot of energy, generate very few jobs and release a significant amount of pollutants into the atmosphere, with between 80% and 99% of the energy used coming from fossil fuels. According to the New York Times study, all the Bitcoin factories installed in the United States release around 16.4 million tonnes of pollutants into the atmosphere every year.
The largest plants also generate a great deal of heat around them. The Jameson plant in North Dakota, for example, has melted all the snow around its eight buildings. The plant also generates noise pollution, with the number of fans needed to cool the site’s 30,000 or so computers producing a sound that can be heard over 800 meters away. The environmental impact of bitcoin production plants is very real, and not limited to electricity production.
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