Digital experts aim for 'Alberta solution' to environmentally friendly cryptocurrency mining

Source: Mark Villani · CTV NEWS · | May 19, 2021

CALGARY -- Lead innovators and experts in the world of digital cryptocurrencies are putting Alberta on the map as a prime destination to reduce the carbon intensity required to create them.

Although currencies like Bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH) or Dogecoin (DOGE) don’t physically exist, they do in fact require a great deal of energy to produce in what’s known as a process called mining.

Mining is when new cryptocurrencies enter into circulation, which is performed using very sophisticated computers that solve extremely complex computational math problems.

According to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, energy used to create Bitcoin alone is now equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of the entire province of Ontario, which hovers around 115 annual terawatt hours (TWh).

In fact, a single transaction of Bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions, or 51,210 hours of watching YouTube. 

Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) finance professor Harry Vadalkar hopes to solve this issue right here at home. 

He says Alberta is the sunniest province in Canada with plenty of solar energy potential and its cooler temperatures can also help reduce the cost of cooling the mining servers.

“We have a lot of solar potential, a lot of renewable potential, plus it is cold six months of the year so you don’t spend too much energy cooling down those mining servers,” Vadalkar said.

“The other big part in this is that Canada has a carbon tax regime, so if Bitcoin miners don’t use clean energy they have a carbon footprint and have to pay for that so that again incentivizes them to search for low carbon intensive resources.”