Revolut head of crypto: “Washing machines use more energy than bitcoin”

Did Revolut suggest that Tesseract Energy build a blockchain energy company to sustainably power bitcoin?

Image credit: Ed Cooper/Revolut/Alan Chang/Tesseract Energy.

Bitcoin’s proof-of-stake (PoW) consensus mechanism has been scrutinized for being energy-intensive, but Ed Cooper, Revolut’s crypto product owner, believes environmental fears about bitcoin are misplaced.

“Everybody says since bitcoin uses a lot of energy, therefore it’s bad,” Cooper said at the Bloomberg Technology Summit in London yesterday.

“Washing machines and Christmas lights both use more energy than the bitcoin network,” he said.

Cooper referenced an article that cited a 2015 study from the Center of Global Development. The study suggested that the use of Christmas lights in the US was 6.6 TWh, the most of any country. The article compared these figures to the energy use of the 9.5 m Antiminer S9 mining operation, which apparently consumed 0.3648 TWh over an unspecified period of time.

Data from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Index suggests that bitcoin mining uses 92TWh compared to 104TWh used for refrigerators in the US.

However, according to the European Central Bank (ECB), the energy consumption involved in crypto mining is equivalent to more than one year’s energy consumption for countries such as France, Spain, the Netherlands and Austria. Global mining reached peak energy use of 450 TWh, ECB suggests.

The ECB report claims that PoW is the main reason behind energy use. PoW is bitcoin’s voting process of choice, with Ethereum having started the transition to a proof-of-stake system that will be 99.95% more energy efficient, according to the Ethereum Foundation.

Regardless of whether Cooper was joking or not, he mentioned that a “The ex-Revolut person has now started a renewable energy company … one of the ways they’re going to smooth out demand is by mining bitcoin”.

Last week, AltFi spoke with former Revolut chief revenue officer Alan Chang, who currently heads Tessaract Energy, along with former Revolut employee Charles Orr.

According to the Tesseract Energy website, the firm focused on building a “terawatt of renewable capacity to power the world”.

In the interview, Chang said that Tesseract wants to “take the trend of decentralization and democratization into energy”.

Not much is known about Tesseract Energy, which raised $78 million in a funding round earlier this month led by Balderton, Lakestar, Accel, Creandum, Lowercarbon and Ribbit.

But if decentralization is to be a core element of Tesseract, an energy blockchain company could be in the works. Still, a look at Tesseract’s website indicates no mining plans so far.

Tesseract Energy and Revolut did not respond to a request for comment.