#NFT ENERGY CONSUMPTION SOFTWARE#

If a digital artist wants to sell an NFT, they first have to “tokenize” their work on a blockchain, which is a kind of tamper-resistant digital public ledger many use the Ethereum blockchain.

#NFT ENERGY CONSUMPTION SOFTWARE#

Around the world, vastly larger cryptocurrency operations have sprung up from Texas to Iran to China’s Inner Mongolia-almost anywhere miners can hook up to cheap electricity-filling air-conditioned, warehouse-sized spaces with endless rows of high powered computers running software to essentially convert energy into wealth.Īll this may come as a surprise to artists and others adopting NFTs, in part because they’re far removed from the technology’s environmental cost.

Even those small mining operations can overload local grids, creating a problem for local utilities. In an emerging hype cycle, such digital assets have sold at auction for millions of dollars, giving the buyer claim to an “original” version of a computer file, such as a piece of digital art or a sports highlight video.ĭuring the last crypto boom, the region-home to some of the cheapest electricity in the U.S.-was beset by a new energy-hungry home industry: basements and sheds loaded with racks of computers churning through advanced mathematical calculations in order to “mine” valuable crypto coins like Bitcoin or Ethereum. In the manufacturing industry, it is closer to only 25%.In central Washington State, electric utilities are watching for homes with oddly high power usage after a recent surge in cryptocurrency prices collided with a boom in NFTs, or “non-fungible tokens”-an emerging technology that uses crypto platforms to authenticate ownership of digital files. Transportation accounts for 80% of the financial industry’s energy use. The industrial and manufacturing sectors are far more procurement- and-facilities driven than the financial sector, which is predominantly human- and travel-driven. Department of Defense came from 207.45 TWh of energy use, or, a carbon intensity of around 270g CO2 per kWh - primarily driven by fuel use instead of electricity. We even know that the 57 Mt CO2 emitted by the U.S.

We know that fuel use accounts for around 11% of energy use, facilities for around 6% and the final 83% coming from the nearly $2 trillion dollar military industry. Again, we’re faced with the emissions versus energy problem, but luckily, we have enough transparency in the data to make valid estimates. The United Nations Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (Global ABC) provides detailed data on the building and construction sector in its annual “ Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction.” The below figure comes from the 2020 iteration of its report, and is based on data from The International Energy Association’s (IEA) “ World Energy Statistics and Balances Database” (paywalled) and “ Energy Technology Perspectives” report (free).Īs per my previous piece, we saw that the global military industrial complex was responsible for roughly 5% of global GHG emissions, or around 2,500 Mt CO2e per year. Bitcoin’s Energy Use Compared To Building And Construction So! Now that we know Bitcoin’s carbon intensity is 280 g of CO2 per kWh (or 0.28 megatonnes of CO2 per TWh), and that Bitcoin uses 79 TWh per year, we can quickly arrive at an emissions figure of 22.1 Mt CO2 per year. Comparing Bitcoin to global primary energy production shows that Bitcoin is less than half as carbon intense, and when compared to the world’s grid, is over 40% less carbon intense. Figure three: Carbon intensity and energy mix comparative data, CBECI and BMC scenariosĪs can be seen, since the Chinese exodus, Bitcoin’s carbon intensity has dropped by a third, from 419 to 280, mainly as a result of shifting away from coal to the much cleaner natural gas.

Nft energy consumption