Bitcoin’s net emission is down for the third month in a row
The environmental impact of Bitcoin mining has been a hot topic in the past year, especially in the U.S. After the long-awaited mining ban in China, a large number of large mining operations have established themselves in the U.S., taking advantage of loose regulation and low energy. prices.
The influx of mining companies into the United States raised concerns about their impact on energy consumption, as many regulators feared they would increase demand for fossil fuel-based energy.
However, the latest research from Daniel Batten, the founder of CH4Capital, shows that the net emissions from Bitcoin mining have decreased significantly.
The research looked at Bitcoin’s electricity consumption as estimated by the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) and adjusted it to account for different energy sources used by miners. It found that net emissions from Bitcoin mining in the US have fallen from 35.3 megatons of CO2 in December 2022 to 32.04 megatons of CO2 in February 2023.
And while Batten acknowledged that these calculations rely on Cambridge data that tends to overestimate electrical consumption, he noted that the downward trend is still in place.
A large part of this decline can be attributed to Marathon Digital, one of the largest public Bitcoin mining companies in the United States. In December, Marathon announced that around 100,000 of their newly acquired ASIC miners would be hosted on wind and solar farms, deploying the majority. of those in Texas. The company will deploy a total of 133,000 miners across the US, with all powered by renewable energy sources.
The push towards renewable energy in the US will most likely prompt other major miners to consider solar and wind power.
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