Satellites Reveal Heat Leaking From Largest Us Cryptocurrency Mining Center

It would be wonderful if we could capture that waste heat and give it a useful purpose, like heating homes, or perhaps even generating new electricity.

(And this is before getting into the fact that I believe mining cryptocurrency is a wasteful use of electricity in the first place.)

I guess, if it's using fossil fuel to generate power it's also just moving heat from one place to another, but really really slowly. The relevant factor there is that the long term storage was performing a important secondary function of holding a lot of co2.

It's in Texas, surely that's an area amenable to solar production. What are they actually using there.

So it's a useful figure if you want to make a shocking headline. "Uses as much power as infinity of something that uses no power!"

Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing complain about at the moment so here we are.

Arc furnace foundry : 500 kw/tonne

Production : 150 t/hr

500*150 = 75 MW/h

Estimated energy production from all combustion and nuclear from the industrial revolution onwards, assumed that heat was dumped into the atmosphere evenly at once, calculate temperature rise based on atmosphere makeup. Ignores the impact of some of that heat getting sinked into the ground and ocean, and the increased thermal radiation out to space over that period. In general, heat flows from the ground and ocean into the atmosphere instead of the other way around, and the rise in thermal radiation isn't that large.

On the other hand, this isn't something that the smart professionals ever talk about when discussing climate change, so I'm sure that the napkin math working out so close to explaining the whole effect has to be missing something.

Humans produce about 20TW globally at this time (ChatGPT), while the sun adds about 174000TW of energy to the earth.

I guess you could argue that our waste heat does something, but I think the greenhouse gases that trap this enormous energy more effectively have a far bigger effect.

We use a fraction of the sun’s total energy output each year, orders of magnitude more energy are in sunlight radiating onto the Earth than in the heat rejected from buildings with air conditioning.

I also think we are pretty dumb. But what reference point makes you think we are either smarter or dumber than other spacefaring species

We’re not a species that will likely ever reach singularity. We operate in packs and if we don’t have a pack we’re loyal to then it’s every man for themselves.

Welcome to our cashless society. It’s naive to think no one would fight back.

It may have devolved to useless speculation and gambling for now, but the genie cannot be put back into the bottle very easily at this point.

You want to read about "conservation of etendue" for a technical explanation. For an easier explanation, look for xkcd's excellent "Fire from Moonlight".