Because bitcoins are completely decentralised and fungible, there is no real driver to Bitcoin miners paying more for renewable energy, other than the threat of government intervention.
I can’t read the full article to see if there is a rebuttal though as it’s behind a paywall.
With bad enough P.R., users could turn away from it. There are incentives and disincentives for miners quite apart from legal issues, regardless of decentralization.
Bitcoin Miners Eye Nuclear Power as Environmental Criticism Mounts
Some cryptocurrency miners are striking deals with operators of struggling nuclear plants, which are carbon-free and have excess power capacity to spare
By Jennifer Hiller - WSJ
Bitcoin miners, under fire for their sizable environmental footprint, are forging partnerships with owners of struggling nuclear-power plants with electricity to spare.
The matchups have the potential to solve key issues facing each industry, executives and analysts say: Electricity-hungry bitcoin miners want stable and carbon-free power, while nuclear plants facing competition from cheaper power sources need new customers.
Talen Energy Corp. has entered into a joint venture with bitcoin-mining company TeraWulf Inc., which has started land development for a mining facility the size of four football fields next to its Pennsylvania nuclear plant. Nuclear generator Energy Harbor Corp. will provide power to a Standard Power mining center in Ohio starting in December.
“We are building demand adjacent to the existing nuclear plant,” said Talen Energy President Alex Hernandez, who heads the subsidiary jointly developing the mining project near the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station.
New nuclear projects are eyeing cryptocurrency miners as well: Startup Oklo Inc., which plans to build a small-scale fission power plant that can run on used nuclear fuel, has signed a 20-year supply deal with hardware and hosting firm Compass Mining.
“Both industry’s challenges are the other industry’s positives,” said Sean Lawrie, partner at consulting firm ScottMadden Inc.
Mining bitcoin is an energy-intensive process. To unlock more of the currency, miners must solve mathematical puzzles that become increasingly complex, which means they require more computing power—and electricity. Mining a decade ago required only a person with a PC, but rising bitcoin prices and a limited supply have created a race. The way to boost the odds of figuring out the puzzle is to put more machines to work.
“At the core of bitcoin mining is energy and energy infrastructure,” said Paul Prager, chief executive of TeraWulf.
The rise of vast mining operations has fueled criticism from environmentalists and others that growing use of fossil-fuel electricity for cryptocurrency could waste resources and worsen climate change. A tweet from Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk expressing concern over the environmental impact of mining operations briefly caused bitcoin prices to fall in May.
Nuclear power, meanwhile, has lost public favor in the wake of accidents such as Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster and has struggled to compete economically in the U.S.
Nuclear plants provide a steady source of emissions-free power, but like coal-fired power plants, many face a daunting challenge selling their output in wholesale power markets amid stiff competition from wind and solar power—and natural-gas generation, which became cheaper after the fracking boom led to huge new discoveries of the fuel.
“They’re still making money because they’re still running, but it’s very hard for them in the current power markets to recover a fair return on their maintenance investments,” said Travis Miller, energy and utilities strategist for Morningstar.
Numerous nuclear plants have been retired in the U.S. in recent years, including the Indian Point facility outside of New York City formerly owned by Entergy Corp. With retirements likely to outpace new projects, nuclear is poised to decrease in the U.S. electricity mix in coming years, according to the Energy Information Administration.
Exelon Corp. EXC -0.83%▲ in June said that it would shut two of three Illinois nuclear plants that failed to sell their electricity during the most recent wholesale power auction for PJM Interconnection, which operates a market serving 13 states and Washington, D.C. That led state lawmakers to approve a bailout this month to keep the plants running.
Talen’s Susquehanna plant also had fewer megawatts clear the same PJM auction than ...
That sounds like a recipe for a funding disaster. The chances that cryptocurrency fad, especially PoW based is remotely as profitable or even operational in 20 years must be in low single digits if even that.
Global government intervention disincentivizing fossil plants for everyone would be a net positive. And if the miners are subsidizing the sustainable power industry, that would also be a net positive for everyone as the state of the art advances to keep up.
I've not heard that nuclear fission is particularly sustainable. Clean, relative to fossil fuels, yes. But sustainable? Does that word even make sense to use in referring to nuclear power, outside the technical sense of "self-sustaining fission reaction"?
I certainly won’t be, but I think disasters where entire communities become unlivable because of groundwater or water supply pollution are more likely. Maybe there’s a slowly developing disaster in progress.
Some of the largest economies on this planet have poured massive resources into fission for literally decades. Whatever we might discover/improve, we already did, anything past that seems to have quite diminishing returns.
Particularly compared to other technological fields that didn't even get remotely the same levels of funding and time investment.
Which means there's much more potential there for actually innovative breakthroughs.
Case in point: Grid-scale storage was for the longest time a field that saw barely any attention, it's quite underdeveloped. As the common consensus was that fission will deliver all the electricity we would ever need.
Now we have plenty of renewables, but we lack the storage to fully utilize them. Which means if we get grid-storage right, we have already solved a very big part of the problem.
It just seems that the next step is going to be for bitcoin miners to start building a Dyson Sphere even though it will kill the rest of the planet off.
It is interesting; both in title and content. Environmental criticism is not exactly that new, but happens to coincide governments realizing that it may be a little hard to contain. Environmentalism is an easy reason to give for shutting it down. Some will even cheer it.
I've been a huge crypto skeptic for a while now, but I've actually changed my tune a bit in that I believe there is a purpose for crypto in the backend of our financial system, given how generally insane settlement procedures are today.
But long term, proof-of-work is a definite dead end. I'm not sure if Bitcoin will eventually collapse, or of it will find a way to transition to some other proof mechanism before it does so, but proof-of-work is fundamentally not viable. By design the amount of energy required to keep the network secure increases as the value of the network grows - that's the exact opposite of most endeavors, where growth gets you economies of scale which greatly reduce per-item costs.
So the only options are either that BTC has a relative ceiling on it's total value, or it eventually takes up a majority of worldwide energy use. I'm guessing the wheels will come off before the latter occurs.
I think thats a pretty big assumption. What about rooftop solar?...if excess energy was used to mine btc. You would have incentive for solar adoption and the most fair and distributed system possible. Not saying this is how it goes but there's possibilities out there that can make sense.
Also has anyone actually looked at the btc energy usage as a percentage of global energy usage? Its a pimple and that rate does not increase with userbase it increases with coin value which will hit a plateau.
Rooftop solar, nuclear, coal, oil, hydro - literally NONE of this matters.
The whole thing about proof-of-work is that it serves as a way to prove that a particular miner spent some amount of money (in the form of energy costs) validating a transaction. As the value of Bitcoin increases, then, it means there is more incentive to throw energy at the problem, because the reward you get for mining (or, for that matter, for a chain attack) is worth more.
There is no way to get out of the proof-of-work problem by deploying cheaper or more abundant forms of energy, because, again by design, it just means that any miner would need to use more of that cheaper form of energy to validate a transaction.
The issue really comes down to that some people think its a waste of energy and some people do not. Im in the do not think its a waste camp. And as mentioned above, the hash rate is not an infinite black hole, it levels off as the price levels off regardless of userbase.
> The issue really comes down to that some people think its a waste of energy and some people do not
No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm making no judgment at all as to whether validating transactions is a good use of energy.
> And as mentioned above, the hash rate is not an infinite black hole, it levels off as the price levels off regardless of userbase.
Exactly, and your statement here 100% proves my point. Since the total number of Bitcoins is fixed, the only 2 options are (1) "the price levels off" as you put it - but the only way (long term) for the price to level off, when supply is restricted, is for demand to eventually wane. The other option (2) is for Bitcoin to eventually become a sizable portion of the financial system, in which case it's energy demands will grow proportionally.
The point I'm trying to emphasize is that Bitcoin backers' position is not possibly consistent: either Bitcoin becomes widely deployed for actually facilitating transactions, in which case its energy use grows proportionally, or its energy use plateaus, in which case it means usage of Bitcoin will have plateaued as well. There is no middle option.
> either Bitcoin becomes widely deployed for actually facilitating transactions, in which case its energy use grows proportionally, or its energy use plateaus
Again thats not how it works. Energy usage does not grow in proportion with transactions. It grows in proportion to hash rate which is a function of market capitalization value. I can assure you the MC of bitcoin is not going to grow exponentially infinitely because that is a physical impossibility.
Yes, you are absolutely correct, energy usage is a function of market cap. But my point is that if people actually start using Bitcoin to facilitate transactions (instead of its primary purpose of a speculative asset as it exists today) then its market cap would explode. And again, this has been what Bitcoin proponents have been arguing forever now - that the time to "get in" is now, because once it starts being used for "real commerce", demand will soar.
There is just no getting around the fact that the more "popular" Bitcoin gets ("popularity" eventually has to show up in market cap) that its energy use will grow in lock step.
No, I dont think I am. You specifically said “in proportion” to transaction volume, not as a non linear residual effect. That is an incorrect growth assumption. And frankly you’re editing your answers above too fast for me to keep up with.
> The issue really comes down to that some people think its a waste of energy and some people do not.
That's not the only issue, another is how BC did not really deliver on what it originally promised.
Instead, the whole cryptomarket seems to have simply turned a massive speculative market with more manipulation going on than any other financial market.
So all these high and noble goals crypto originally started out on, have turned into a whole bunch of people just trying to make the largest profits, even if that means defrauding a whole bunch of people of their savings.
I think twitter announced bitcoin tipping last week and we have nations adopting it as a national currency (both wide scale implementations). I dont know how you can arrive at a "non delivery" conclusion.
> Rooftop solar, nuclear, coal, oil, hydro - literally NONE of this matters
.. as long as the Carbon-centric economy grows, food-miles continue, the high-end leisure hotel market gets subsidy and wasteful wars continue to literally kill and maim as well as use yet more fossil fuel, yes, agree.. none of that matters
Proof of work allows you to buy crypto from your local power company. So long as the federal governments are restricting the purchase of crypto (or are believed to be able, to restrict) - there will be a need and use, for proof of work.
>I believe there is a purpose for crypto in the backend of our financial system
That seems paradoxical to me. The power of blockchain (to me, okay, I'm no blockchain expert, I'm barely a novice) comes from the number of people publicly using your blockchain because every user added makes it that much more difficult to execute a 51%-style attack on the blockchain.
Stuffing blockchain under the rug by placing it exclusively on the back-end seems like you wouldn't actually be having people use it in a way that wouldn't be just as useful by including a hash on each transaction in your transaction DB. If we're being honest, the people "trading" cryptocurrencies on the current exchanges are antithetical to what crypto is about because they're not actually trading cryptocurrencies - they're trading the rights to the cryptocurrencies owned by the exchange. By centralizing the ownership of the cryptocurrencies to the exchanges instead of using their own wallet, they're again opening the gates further to a 51% attack.
This argument doesn't make any sense. Electricity is really easy to transmit across the power grid. There is no such thing as an isolated power plant with excess electricity.
Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else.
Given the drastically falling costs of renewable energy, how does the nuclear power hype train continue? Their main justification for it now is that it's clean, compared to fossil fuels. That doesn't account for the greenhouse gas contribution from the mining and processing of uranium, which isn't renewable. More importantly, is there any way it will ever compete on cost? Why choose a clean, non-renewable source that costs more than a clean renewable? What about factoring in the costs of the waste and decommissioning of nuclear power plants?
You also have to extract copper and steel to build wind farms, and drive trucks to install solar panels. The net greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear is at most equal to, and likely less than other renewables: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...
And the huge win provided by nuclear power is it's geographic independence and consistent output. Nuclear plants work regardless of wind speed, and give the same output in the Arctic circle as they do at the equator. And this output is consistent, it doesn't fluctuate with weather or day/night cycles. This eliminates the need for storage, which is something we don't currently have the capability to build at any substantial scale.
That's what people don't realize when they compare costs of nuclear vs solar + wind. The reality is it's costs of nuclear vs. costs of solar + wind + thousands of miles of HVDC lines to move energy from rural areas to population centers + massive amounts of grid storage to accommodate intermittent generation.
The Pacific Northridge National Laboratory was able to extract uranium from seawater at $200/lb, as per the linked article. This is an order of magnitude greater than the price of conventional extraction, so it makes no sense for commercial providers. But uranium extraction amounts to a negligible fraction of the cost of nuclear power, so even if economies of scale fail to bring the price down this amounts a fraction of a cent increase in the cost per KWh. Not to mention there's at least hundreds of years worth - thousand of years if we use reprocessing - worth of conventionally accessible uranium.
If output is the same, and HVDC is now available, should we actually start building them in the Arctic? Pros: no population centers, lots of cooling, no hurricanes. Cons?
Transmission losses and the cost of building thousands of miles of HVDC. Just build them where there is demand for energy, and save the money that would otherwise be spent on transmission infrastructure. Not to mention the difficult logistics of constructing power plants in the middle of nowhere.
In many regions, solar is not a viable option. The other renewables cannot compete in terms of scale. We should have been innovating in fission for the last 40 years, but we weren't. Stupid. Fusion almost seems more likely than large-scale fission growth at this point.
The demand for gas is increasing because the wind isn't blowing as much as they thought it would. You still need the entire fossil generation system as a backup for renewables for when the sun doesn't shine and wind doesn't blow. Until there is grid scale electrical energy storage, renewables simply increase the cost of the whole system.
Virtually all major utilities in the US also offer renewable energy credits (RECs) for a fee which guarantee a given number of kWhs were produced with 100% renewable energy.
Transmission is a major source of logistical and operational complexity for a power grid. Routing energy across long distances and accounting for changing generation and consumption patterns are problems many intelligent people have spent their careers optimizing the various trade offs.
> Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else
There are numbers of locations that would be great sources of geothermal power that have literally no way of transmitting that power. Build a mining operation there, no one would notice or care.
People build aluminium plants and data centres in those places, so yes they would care.
There really isn't any "spare energy" that can be used for guilt-free bitcoin mining.
At least not on an industrial scale. Some countries use resistive electric heating for some domestic heating and you could replace that with mining. That's a small edge case though.
another way to arrive at your same conclusion, top down if you will, is to point out that the whole idea behind Proof Of Work is to perform an expensive operation, "wasting" it so to speak, on the mining of that coin. If BTC costs $40K+ to mine, then till you're (collectively) "wasting" that much work to mine it, more miners will be incented to join in.
If you come up with a scheme to make economic dual use of the Work (mine bitcoin and heat houses) then it will no longer cost enough Work and again, more mining will be incented till the price equalizes again.
So I've been lazy about this, but I've been intending to do an economic of the system I've had installed for some time.
In short, a 8kh with 24kwh battery backup leaves me with plenty of overage to send back to the grid where I live. I get about .1/ kwh I send back to the grid (I don't but this require more detail on why), and I would get .2-.6 /kwh if I run an antminer s9. I would need 6 to match the total demand I have at peak generation and the additional cost would be ~3k (32k for the whole solar system, so total 35kish). Only doing bitcoin on my surplus angry pixies would basically cover the cost of the solar loan, the power bill, and maybe some extra.
Basically, through a combination of subsidies, geography, and credit score, if you've got the technical know-how, in my region one could effectively not have a power bill through a combination of solar and bitcoin mining.
I took a boat ride yesterday and on the dock I asked my friend if they pay a flat rate for electricity or per kwh. He said a flat rate. Which obviously I joked we should mine Bitcoin on his boat. But I really wonder if we would get caught doing it.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadI can’t read the full article to see if there is a rebuttal though as it’s behind a paywall.
By Jennifer Hiller - WSJ
Bitcoin miners, under fire for their sizable environmental footprint, are forging partnerships with owners of struggling nuclear-power plants with electricity to spare. The matchups have the potential to solve key issues facing each industry, executives and analysts say: Electricity-hungry bitcoin miners want stable and carbon-free power, while nuclear plants facing competition from cheaper power sources need new customers. Talen Energy Corp. has entered into a joint venture with bitcoin-mining company TeraWulf Inc., which has started land development for a mining facility the size of four football fields next to its Pennsylvania nuclear plant. Nuclear generator Energy Harbor Corp. will provide power to a Standard Power mining center in Ohio starting in December. “We are building demand adjacent to the existing nuclear plant,” said Talen Energy President Alex Hernandez, who heads the subsidiary jointly developing the mining project near the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station.
New nuclear projects are eyeing cryptocurrency miners as well: Startup Oklo Inc., which plans to build a small-scale fission power plant that can run on used nuclear fuel, has signed a 20-year supply deal with hardware and hosting firm Compass Mining. “Both industry’s challenges are the other industry’s positives,” said Sean Lawrie, partner at consulting firm ScottMadden Inc. Mining bitcoin is an energy-intensive process. To unlock more of the currency, miners must solve mathematical puzzles that become increasingly complex, which means they require more computing power—and electricity. Mining a decade ago required only a person with a PC, but rising bitcoin prices and a limited supply have created a race. The way to boost the odds of figuring out the puzzle is to put more machines to work. “At the core of bitcoin mining is energy and energy infrastructure,” said Paul Prager, chief executive of TeraWulf. The rise of vast mining operations has fueled criticism from environmentalists and others that growing use of fossil-fuel electricity for cryptocurrency could waste resources and worsen climate change. A tweet from Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk expressing concern over the environmental impact of mining operations briefly caused bitcoin prices to fall in May. Nuclear power, meanwhile, has lost public favor in the wake of accidents such as Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster and has struggled to compete economically in the U.S. Nuclear plants provide a steady source of emissions-free power, but like coal-fired power plants, many face a daunting challenge selling their output in wholesale power markets amid stiff competition from wind and solar power—and natural-gas generation, which became cheaper after the fracking boom led to huge new discoveries of the fuel.
“They’re still making money because they’re still running, but it’s very hard for them in the current power markets to recover a fair return on their maintenance investments,” said Travis Miller, energy and utilities strategist for Morningstar. Numerous nuclear plants have been retired in the U.S. in recent years, including the Indian Point facility outside of New York City formerly owned by Entergy Corp. With retirements likely to outpace new projects, nuclear is poised to decrease in the U.S. electricity mix in coming years, according to the Energy Information Administration. Exelon Corp. EXC -0.83%▲ in June said that it would shut two of three Illinois nuclear plants that failed to sell their electricity during the most recent wholesale power auction for PJM Interconnection, which operates a market serving 13 states and Washington, D.C. That led state lawmakers to approve a bailout this month to keep the plants running. Talen’s Susquehanna plant also had fewer megawatts clear the same PJM auction than ...
I've not heard that nuclear fission is particularly sustainable. Clean, relative to fossil fuels, yes. But sustainable? Does that word even make sense to use in referring to nuclear power, outside the technical sense of "self-sustaining fission reaction"?
Some of the largest economies on this planet have poured massive resources into fission for literally decades. Whatever we might discover/improve, we already did, anything past that seems to have quite diminishing returns.
Particularly compared to other technological fields that didn't even get remotely the same levels of funding and time investment.
Which means there's much more potential there for actually innovative breakthroughs.
Case in point: Grid-scale storage was for the longest time a field that saw barely any attention, it's quite underdeveloped. As the common consensus was that fission will deliver all the electricity we would ever need.
Now we have plenty of renewables, but we lack the storage to fully utilize them. Which means if we get grid-storage right, we have already solved a very big part of the problem.
It just seems that the next step is going to be for bitcoin miners to start building a Dyson Sphere even though it will kill the rest of the planet off.
But long term, proof-of-work is a definite dead end. I'm not sure if Bitcoin will eventually collapse, or of it will find a way to transition to some other proof mechanism before it does so, but proof-of-work is fundamentally not viable. By design the amount of energy required to keep the network secure increases as the value of the network grows - that's the exact opposite of most endeavors, where growth gets you economies of scale which greatly reduce per-item costs.
So the only options are either that BTC has a relative ceiling on it's total value, or it eventually takes up a majority of worldwide energy use. I'm guessing the wheels will come off before the latter occurs.
Also has anyone actually looked at the btc energy usage as a percentage of global energy usage? Its a pimple and that rate does not increase with userbase it increases with coin value which will hit a plateau.
The whole thing about proof-of-work is that it serves as a way to prove that a particular miner spent some amount of money (in the form of energy costs) validating a transaction. As the value of Bitcoin increases, then, it means there is more incentive to throw energy at the problem, because the reward you get for mining (or, for that matter, for a chain attack) is worth more.
There is no way to get out of the proof-of-work problem by deploying cheaper or more abundant forms of energy, because, again by design, it just means that any miner would need to use more of that cheaper form of energy to validate a transaction.
No, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm making no judgment at all as to whether validating transactions is a good use of energy.
> And as mentioned above, the hash rate is not an infinite black hole, it levels off as the price levels off regardless of userbase.
Exactly, and your statement here 100% proves my point. Since the total number of Bitcoins is fixed, the only 2 options are (1) "the price levels off" as you put it - but the only way (long term) for the price to level off, when supply is restricted, is for demand to eventually wane. The other option (2) is for Bitcoin to eventually become a sizable portion of the financial system, in which case it's energy demands will grow proportionally.
The point I'm trying to emphasize is that Bitcoin backers' position is not possibly consistent: either Bitcoin becomes widely deployed for actually facilitating transactions, in which case its energy use grows proportionally, or its energy use plateaus, in which case it means usage of Bitcoin will have plateaued as well. There is no middle option.
Again thats not how it works. Energy usage does not grow in proportion with transactions. It grows in proportion to hash rate which is a function of market capitalization value. I can assure you the MC of bitcoin is not going to grow exponentially infinitely because that is a physical impossibility.
Yes, you are absolutely correct, energy usage is a function of market cap. But my point is that if people actually start using Bitcoin to facilitate transactions (instead of its primary purpose of a speculative asset as it exists today) then its market cap would explode. And again, this has been what Bitcoin proponents have been arguing forever now - that the time to "get in" is now, because once it starts being used for "real commerce", demand will soar.
There is just no getting around the fact that the more "popular" Bitcoin gets ("popularity" eventually has to show up in market cap) that its energy use will grow in lock step.
That's not the only issue, another is how BC did not really deliver on what it originally promised.
Instead, the whole cryptomarket seems to have simply turned a massive speculative market with more manipulation going on than any other financial market.
So all these high and noble goals crypto originally started out on, have turned into a whole bunch of people just trying to make the largest profits, even if that means defrauding a whole bunch of people of their savings.
El Salvador has 6 million people, China has around 1.4 billion people.
.. as long as the Carbon-centric economy grows, food-miles continue, the high-end leisure hotel market gets subsidy and wasteful wars continue to literally kill and maim as well as use yet more fossil fuel, yes, agree.. none of that matters
meanwhile, viva crypto
That seems paradoxical to me. The power of blockchain (to me, okay, I'm no blockchain expert, I'm barely a novice) comes from the number of people publicly using your blockchain because every user added makes it that much more difficult to execute a 51%-style attack on the blockchain.
Stuffing blockchain under the rug by placing it exclusively on the back-end seems like you wouldn't actually be having people use it in a way that wouldn't be just as useful by including a hash on each transaction in your transaction DB. If we're being honest, the people "trading" cryptocurrencies on the current exchanges are antithetical to what crypto is about because they're not actually trading cryptocurrencies - they're trading the rights to the cryptocurrencies owned by the exchange. By centralizing the ownership of the cryptocurrencies to the exchanges instead of using their own wallet, they're again opening the gates further to a 51% attack.
Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else.
Not to mention, there's enough accessible uranium to make concerns about the being "renewable" moot: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...
And the huge win provided by nuclear power is it's geographic independence and consistent output. Nuclear plants work regardless of wind speed, and give the same output in the Arctic circle as they do at the equator. And this output is consistent, it doesn't fluctuate with weather or day/night cycles. This eliminates the need for storage, which is something we don't currently have the capability to build at any substantial scale.
That's what people don't realize when they compare costs of nuclear vs solar + wind. The reality is it's costs of nuclear vs. costs of solar + wind + thousands of miles of HVDC lines to move energy from rural areas to population centers + massive amounts of grid storage to accommodate intermittent generation.
Furthermore, full decomissioning and waste storage costs are included for the whole lifecycle, so that argument is moot.
How nice to ignore inconvenient facts like Europe's skyrocketing energy costs.
1) The conglomerates profiting from nuclear are not the same profiting from renewable energy.
2) Renewables can be very decentralized. Nuclear is the most centralized. This changes the balance of power.
3) A small set of people paid to push for some ideas on the Internet can shift public opinion a lot.
> Any electricity used for Bitcoin is electricity that isn't used to take a coal-fired power plant offline somewhere else
There are numbers of locations that would be great sources of geothermal power that have literally no way of transmitting that power. Build a mining operation there, no one would notice or care.
There really isn't any "spare energy" that can be used for guilt-free bitcoin mining.
At least not on an industrial scale. Some countries use resistive electric heating for some domestic heating and you could replace that with mining. That's a small edge case though.
If you come up with a scheme to make economic dual use of the Work (mine bitcoin and heat houses) then it will no longer cost enough Work and again, more mining will be incented till the price equalizes again.
Basically, through a combination of subsidies, geography, and credit score, if you've got the technical know-how, in my region one could effectively not have a power bill through a combination of solar and bitcoin mining.