Coal Dies Slowly, But Dies Nonetheless
Many people speculate as to the future of energy generation and consumption on a global basis, and here’s what seems most probable: a smooth downward curve–nothing radical or abrupt.
New Zealand, for instance, will likely rid itself of coal entirely in 2018, but this came after decades of growth, then flattening, then a slow attenuation based on a simple but inescapable realization: coal is a terrible long-term investment. Climate change is certain to be a dominant concern of human civilization for at least the next 50 – 100 years, so why sink capital into something that will surely find itself under intense and ever-growing pressure?
All of this is common sense; none of it is rocket science.
Sadly, greed, logic, and compassion, often don’t sit at the same table.
Craig,
I’m afraid the musings of activists contributing to obscure on line blogs doesn’t portend the end of the world coal industry.
Like everyone, John Polkinghorne is entitled to his opinion. Only as recently as 4 years ago John was confidently an advocate of imminent “Peak oil”.
Coal is never very viable in nations where little steaming coal is available, hydro-electric is plentiful and demand from heavy industry virtually non existent.
Nations like NZ, Norway etc, have reached the full extent of their power consumption needs. These nations have transferred most of their older heavy industries and population growth has stagnated or decreased.
Coal is viable in nations where high usage ‘power on demand’ energy is required, especially in developing nations with large populations and lacking alternate power sources. Coal usage is increasing in areas like Africa where PRC corporations are building large numbers of massive coal fired power sources to exploit cheap labour, abundant minerals, raw material resources etc.
More interesting is demand totally new consumers whom until recently didn’t exist. The unexpected rise in data mining, especially esoteric activity like Bit Coin mining.
Now just remember, bit coin and other block chain crypto-currencies,don’t physically exist they are solely products of peoples perception and only exist in the ‘ether’, yet the activities surrounding these new entities are consuming vast amounts of energy. The energy spent on mining Bitcoin this year alone has surpassed the average electricity consumed yearly by over 159 nations !
The power required is vast and uncontrolled, but needs reliable ‘power on demand’. A single transaction uses as much electricity as is consumed by the average US household in a week ! (there are about 330,000 transactions per day)
Home
/ Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index
Key Network Statistics
Description Value
Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption* (TWh) 36.8
Annualized global mining revenues $15,131,485,399
Annualized estimated global mining costs $1,839,752,564
Country closest to Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption Bulgaria
Estimated electricity used over the previous day (KWh) 100,808,360
Implied Watts per GH/s 0.271
Total Network Hashrate in PH/s (1,000,000 GH/s) 15,537
Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh) 306.00
Number of U.S. households that could be powered by Bitcoin 3,406,949
Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction 10.35
Bitcoin’s electricity consumption as a percentage of the world’s electricity consumption 0.16%
Annual carbon footprint (kt of CO2) 18,030
Carbon footprint per transaction (kg of CO2) 150.07
*The assumptions underlying this energy consumption estimate can be found here.
Did you know?
Ever since its inception Bitcoin’s trust-minimizing consensus has been enabled by its proof-of-work algorithm. The machines performing the “work” are consuming huge amounts of energy while doing so. The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index was created to provide insight into this amount, and raise awareness on the unsustainability of the proof-of-work algorithm.
Note that the Index contains the aggregate of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash (other forks of the Bitcoin network are not included). A separate index was created for Ethereum, which can be found here.
What kind of work are miners performing?
New sets of transactions (blocks) are added to Bitcoin’s blockchain roughly every 10 minutes by so-called miners. While working on the blockchain these miners aren’t required to trust each other. The only thing miners have to trust is the code that runs Bitcoin. The code includes several rules to validate new transactions. For example, a transaction can only be valid if the sender actually owns the sent amount. Every miner individually confirms whether transactions adhere to these rules, eliminating the need to trust other miners.
The trick is to get all miners to agree on the same history of transactions. Every miner in the network is constantly tasked with preparing the next batch of transactions for the blockchain. Only one of these blocks will be randomly selected to become the latest block on the chain. Random selection in a distributed network isn’t easy, so this is where proof-of-work comes in. In proof-of-work, the next block comes from the first miner that produces a valid one. This is easier said than done, as the Bitcoin protocol makes it very difficult for miners to do so. In fact, the difficulty is regularly adjusted by the protocol to ensure that all miners in the network will only produce one valid bock every 10 minutes on average. Once one of the miners finally manages to produce a valid block, it will inform the rest of the network. Other miners will accept this block once they confirm it adheres to all rules, and then discard whatever block they had been working on themselves. The lucky miner gets rewarded with a fixed amount of coins, along with the transaction fees belonging to the processed transactions in the new block. The cycle then starts again.
The process of producing a valid block is largely based on trial and error, where miners are making numerous attempts every second trying to find the right value for a block component called the “nonce“, and hoping the resulting completed block will match the requirements (as there is no way to predict the outcome). For this reason, mining is sometimes compared to a lottery where you can pick your own numbers. The number of attempts (hashes) per second is given by your mining equipment’s hashrate. This will typically be expressed in Gigahash per second (1 billion hashes per second).
Sustainability
The continuous block mining cycle incentivizes people all over the world to mine Bitcoin. As mining can provide a solid stream of revenue, people are very willing to run power-hungry machines to get a piece of it. Over the years this has caused the total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network to grow to epic proportions, as the price of the currency reached new highs. The entire Bitcoin network now consumes more energy than a number of countries, based on a report published by the International Energy Agency. If Bitcoin was a country, it would rank as shown below.
Apart from the previous comparison, it also possible to compare Bitcoin’s energy consumption to some of the world’s biggest energy consuming nations. The result is shown hereafter.
Carbon footprint
Bitcoin’s biggest problem is not just massive energy consumption, but the network is mostly fueled by coal-fired power plants in China. Even with a conservative emission factor, this results in an extremely high carbon footprint for each Bitcoin transaction.
Other crypto-currencies such as Ripple and Ethereum using less energy hungry operating algorithms still consume a great deal of power.
These are just some of the challenges becoming apparent in 2018 as the development of the technologies developed in the frenzy of the last decade begin to be realized.