For someone who cares about climate change, Matt Carlsson had what seemed like a dream job: teaching clients how to decarbonize buildings. But he was frustrated. He could give customers the tools to improve energy efficiency and phase out fossil fuels, but if they couldn’t easily turn his guidance into cost savings, they’d simply ignore him. “Most of these people are not going to take action,” he realized, “because there’s not going to be a business case.” Carlsson decided that he’d need to find a job where he could make the case for energy efficiency on economic terms. This led him somewhere surprising: bitcoin. Mining bitcoin throws off an enormous amount of heat. That’s because the “mining” in question refers to the energy-intensive computational process by which bitcoin transactions are verified. In a typical transaction, a boxy computer attempts to solve what’s essentially a very complex math problem. If it can do this before any of the other “miners” working on the problem across the world, the miner is rewarded with bitcoin of its own. This process takes a whole lot of power; overall, bitcoin mining accounted for an estimated 0.5 percent of global electricity use in 2024. The more complex the task at hand, the more electricity is needed — and the more heat is created. Essentially, as long as it’s lucrative to mine bitcoin, it’s going to spit out a lot of extra heat as a byproduct. The question becomes: Can that heat be put to beneficial use?…
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