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Because AI and Crypto use so much electricity, what if a law was made that they had to power it with green energy? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Something on the lines of if your company facility is using over X amount of energy the majority of that has to be from a green source such as solar power. What would happen and is this feasible or am I totally thinking about this wrong

Edit: Good responses from everyone, my point in asking this was completely hypothetical, ignoring how hard it would be to implement a restriction. My own thoughts are that requiring the use of renewable energy for high electricity products could help spur the demand for it as now it's a requirement. Of course companies would fight back, they want money

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[–] 17 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Why is it "a lot for a virtual currency?" What's the typical energy usage of a virtual currency?

In 2019 Visa used 740,000 gigajoules of energy, which is equivalent to 6727 households (google dug up a figure of 110 Gj/year for that). So this really doesn't seem like a lot for this kind of thing.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    By your estimate, visa used 3.4x the power of eth. I would guess visa handles much much more than 3.4x the volume of currency transactions and is way more efficient on energy.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago

    The thing that everyone misses in these comparisons is that yes that’s the energy that VISA expended to make these transactions but for a crypto currency the energy use isn’t even to make the transaction. In the end each transaction is a few Bytes of data that have no difficulty getting across the world (much like this post or any comment). The energy use is so “high” because that’s is used to secure the currency. And of course that’s a much harder comparison to make but a fairer one.

    How much energy does the the banking system actually use? How much energy is used to secure the US dollar for example?

    You have to account for the entirety of it. That’s like saying that F1 doesn’t pollute all that much because they use bio fuel and the cars are very energy efficient, completely disregarding the fact that the majority of the pollution is in the constant global shipping of cars and gear, as well as R & D

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  • [–] -3 points 2 years ago

    Probably, but Ethereum does a lot of things that Visa can't. Visa transactions are exceedingly simple. It was just the only generally comparable thing I could think of that I could get energy figures for, do you know of any better examples?

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    And that's just Visa.

    https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/data/2012/c&e/cfm/pba4.php

    That lists the energy usage of banking and financial office space to be 18 billion kWh, or 64.8 petajoules. (About 87x that Visa figure.)

    And even that is just office space. Doesn't factor in the manufacture, distribution, transport, storage, and disposal of physical money, or any other associated costs.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago

    On the flip side, global banking processes something like 5+ orders of magnitude more transactions than ETH, so even at the low end it’s 1000x more efficient than the most well known POS coin.

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