Study uncovers surprising upside tied to Bitcoin’s explosive growth: 'Could drive global e

Study uncovers surprising upside tied to Bitcoin’s explosive growth: ‘Could drive global e

April 27, 2025

Bitcoin mining may help unlock new opportunities for the energy market.

“Researchers said that, while concerns about Bitcoin’s energy consumption persist, it can contribute to solving global energy challenges,” crypto and tech media outlet CCN.com reported.

The process of mining bitcoin can have a troublesome environmental impact. It requires a tremendous amount of energy because massive computer banks are required to mine new blocks on the blockchain and to validate transactions. Bitcoin’s total energy usage represents about 0.4% of the world’s electricity per year, according to the International Energy Agency.

Every time someone makes a cryptocurrency transaction, cryptography is used to secure and validate it, with a process that makes it “computationally infeasible to alter historical transactions,” as Blockpit.io puts it. It is these massive, decentralized computer banks that use all the energy to enable this process every day by producing blocks for storing the data of transactions, along with the process of validating the transactions themselves.

The energy used in bitcoin mining often comes from power stations that run on fuels such as natural gas and coal. These sources produce air pollution that traps heat in our atmosphere, contributing to the warming of the planet.

CCN painted a stark picture. “Bitcoin’s daily energy consumption could power approximately 8.4 million U.S. homes for 24 hours,” it reported.

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These computer banks also need to be cool enough to run properly, so they are often housed in air-conditioned buildings or cooled through immersion in water that cycles in and out. The air conditioners have to work hard, thus using even more energy, and the water usage can be high when immersion is used. Cryptocurrency mining also leads to a lot of e-waste, as the hardware often needs to be replaced to keep up with demand.

For those reasons, the processes involved across bitcoin mining are extremely resource-intensive and have a negative impact on the environment by default, though many in the industry have been working to change that by solving those resource needs in smarter ways.

On that note, CCN’s report detailed how industry experts have discovered ways bitcoin could use its powers for good.

According to Dylan Campbell and Alexander Larsen of IRM Energy and Renewables Group, CCN reported, bitcoin could help support the adoption of affordable renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, reduce methane pollution, and stabilize electricity grids.

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The idea is that by making the creation of new renewable energy operations more profitable by attaching bitcoin to them, it will drive the industry’s growth while drawing down the percentage of energy bitcoin uses from fossil fuel sources. Further, some bitcoin operations have been working with grid operators and other energy providers to run their machines only when there is a surplus of energy, which helps stabilize power supplies to have less extreme peaks and valleys of consumption when such a big energy user voluntarily shuts down its needs as other demand on the grid increases.

In addition, the report said, the heat that bitcoin mining generates could be repurposed to warm homes and businesses, such as a spa in New York City that heats its pool from a small bitcoin mining rig underneath it. For an application like this, if all heat is directly used and otherwise would have needed to come from another source, the energy impact of the mining itself is much lower.

The pair said they hope that by continuing to influence bitcoin mining companies to reduce wasted energy and other resources as much as possible, the negative impact of mining can be minimized.

“Bitcoin miners seek low-cost energy, often from untapped sources,” Campbell and Larsen said, per CCN. “And this practice could drive global energy growth.”