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Bitcoin Energy Consumption drives debate on blockchain mining, proof-of-work, carbon footprint, and emissions, with CCAF estimates in terawatt hours highlighting electricity demand, fossil fuel reliance, and sustainability concerns for data centers and cryptocurrency networks.

Key Points

Electricity used by Bitcoin proof-of-work mining, often fossil-fueled, estimated by CCAF in terawatt hours.

✅ CCAF: 40-445 TWh, central estimate ~130 TWh

✅ ~66% of mining electricity sourced from fossil fuels

✅ Proof-of-work increases hash rate, energy, and emissions

The University of Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) studies the burgeoning business of cryptocurrencies.

It calculates that Bitcoin's total energy consumption is somewhere between 40 and 445 annualised terawatt hours (TWh), with a central estimate of about 130 terawatt hours.

The UK's electricity consumption is a little over 300 TWh a year, while Argentina uses around the same amount of power as the CCAF's best guess for Bitcoin, as countries like New Zealand's electricity future are debated to balance demand.

And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources, with the U.S. grid not 100% renewable underscoring broader energy mix challenges worldwide.

The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that about two-thirds of it is from fossil fuels, and some regions are weighing curbs like Russia's proposed mining ban amid electricity deficits.

Huge computing power - and therefore energy use - is built into the way the blockchain technology that underpins the cryptocurrency has been designed.

It relies on a vast decentralised network of computers.

These are the so-called Bitcoin "miners" who enable new Bitcoins to be created, but also independently verify and record every transaction made in the currency.

In fact, the Bitcoins are the reward miners get for maintaining this record accurately.

It works like a lottery that runs every 10 minutes, explains Gina Pieters, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a research fellow with the CCAF team.

Data processing centres around the world, including hotspots such as Iceland's mining strain, race to compile and submit this record of transactions in a way that is acceptable to the system.

They also have to guess a random number.

The first to submit the record and the correct number wins the prize - this becomes the next block in the blockchain.

Estimates for bitcoin's electricity consumption
At the moment, they are rewarded with six-and-a-quarter Bitcoins, valued at about $50,000 each.

As soon as one lottery is over, a new number is generated, and the whole process starts again.

The higher the price, says Prof Pieters, the more miners want to get into the game, and utilities like BC Hydro suspending new crypto connections highlight grid pressures.

"They want to get that revenue," she tells me, "and that's what's going to encourage them to introduce more and more powerful machines in order to guess this random number, and therefore you will see an increase in energy consumption," she says.

And there is another factor that drives Bitcoin's increasing energy consumption.

The software ensures it always takes 10 minutes for the puzzle to be solved, so if the number of miners is increasing, the puzzle gets harder and the more computing power needs to be thrown at it.

Bitcoin is therefore actually designed to encourage increased computing effort.

The idea is that the more computers that compete to maintain the blockchain, the safer it becomes, because anyone who might want to try and undermine the currency must control and operate at least as much computing power as the rest of the miners put together.

What this means is that, as Bitcoin gets more valuable, the computing effort expended on creating and maintaining it - and therefore the energy consumed - inevitably increases.

We can track how much effort miners are making to create the currency.

They are currently reckoned to be making 160 quintillion calculations every second - that's 160,000,000,000,000,000,000, in case you were wondering.

And this vast computational effort is the cryptocurrency's Achilles heel, says Alex de Vries, the founder of the Digiconomist website and an expert on Bitcoin.

All the millions of trillions of calculations it takes to keep the system running aren't really doing any useful work.

"They're computations that serve no other purpose," says de Vries, "they're just immediately discarded again. Right now we're using a whole lot of energy to produce those calculations, but also the majority of that is sourced from fossil energy, and clean energy's 'dirty secret' complicates substitution."

The vast effort it requires also makes Bitcoin inherently difficult to scale, he argues.

"If Bitcoin were to be adopted as a global reserve currency," he speculates, "the Bitcoin price will probably be in the millions, and those miners will have more money than the entire [US] Federal budget to spend on electricity."

"We'd have to double our global energy production," he says with a laugh, even as some argue cheap abundant electricity is getting closer to reality today. "For Bitcoin."

He says it also limits the number of transactions the system can process to about five per second.

This doesn't make for a useful currency, he argues.

Rising price of bitcoin graphic
And that view is echoed by many eminent figures in finance and economics.

The two essential features of a successful currency are that it is an effective form of exchange and a stable store of value, says Ken Rogoff, a professor of economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

He says Bitcoin is neither.

"The fact is, it's not really used much in the legal economy now. Yes, one rich person sells it to another, but that's not a final use. And without that it really doesn't have a long-term future."

What he is saying is that Bitcoin exists almost exclusively as a vehicle for speculation.

So, I want to know: is the bubble about to burst?

"That's my guess," says Prof Rogoff and pauses.

"But I really couldn't tell you when."

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Vancouver Formula E 2022 delivers an all-electric, net-zero motorsport event in False Creek, featuring sustainability initiatives, clean mobility showcases, concerts, and tourism boosts, with major economic impact, jobs, and a climate action conference.

Key Points

A net-zero, all-electric race in False Creek, uniting EV motorsport with sustainability, concerts, and local jobs.

✅ Net-zero, all-electric FIA championship round in Canada

✅ False Creek street circuit with concerts and green mobility expo

✅ Projected $80M impact and thousands of local jobs

The City of Vancouver is hosting an ABB FIA Formula E World Championship race next year, organizers have announced, aligning with the city's EV-ready policy to accelerate adoption.

The all-electric race is being held in the city's False Creek neighbourhood over the 2022 July long weekend as green energy investments accelerate nationwide, according to promoter OSS Group Inc.

Earlier this year, Vancouver city council voted unanimously in support of a multi-day Formula E event that would include a conference on climate change and sustainability amid predicted EV-demand bottlenecks in B.C.

"Formula E is a win on so many levels, from being a net-zero event that supports sustainable transportation to being a huge boost for our hard-hit tourism sector, our residents, who can access rebates for home and workplace charging, and our local economy," Coun. Sarah Kirby-Yung said in a news release Thursday.

As the region advances sustainable mobility, B.C.'s EV charging expansion continues to lead the country.

The promoter said the Formula E race will bring $80 million in economic value and thousands of jobs to the city, with infrastructure like new EV chargers at YVR also underway, but did not provide any details on how it came to those estimates.

More details on the events surrounding the race, including planned concerts and other EV showcases like Everything Electric, are expected to be announced in the fall.

The last time a Formula E World Championship event came to Canada was the Montreal ePrix in 2017. Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante later cancelled planned Formula E events for 2018 and 2019, citing cost overruns and sponsorship troubles.

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Celtic Interconnector, a subsea electricity link between Ireland and France, connects EU grids via a high-voltage submarine cable, boosting security of supply, renewable integration, and cross-border trade with 700 MW capacity by 2026.

Key Points

A 700 MW subsea link between Ireland and France, boosting security, enabling trade, and supporting renewables.

✅ Approx. 600 km subsea cable from East Cork to Brittany

✅ 700 MW capacity; powers about 450,000 homes

✅ Financed by EIB, banks, CEF; Siemens Energy and Nexans

France and Ireland signed contracts on Friday to advance the Celtic Interconnector, a subsea electricity link to allow the exchange of electricity between the two EU countries. It will be the first interconnector between continental Europe and Ireland, as similar UK interconnector plans move forward in parallel. 

Representatives for Ireland’s electricity grid operator EirGrid and France’s grid operator RTE signed financial and technical agreements for the high-voltage submarine cable, mirroring developments like Maine’s approved transmission line in North America for cross-border power. The countries’ respective energy ministers witnessed the signing.

European commissioner for energy Kadri Simson said:

In the current energy market situation, marked by electricity price volatility, and the need to move away from imports of Russian fossil fuels, European energy infrastructure has become more important than ever.

The Celtic Interconnector is of paramount importance as it will end Ireland’s isolation from the Union’s power system, with parallels to Cyprus joining the electricity highway in the region, and ensure a reliable high-capacity link improving the security of electricity supply and supporting the development of renewables in both Ireland and France.

EirGrid and RTE signed €800 million ($827 million) worth of financing agreements with Barclays, BNP Paribas, Danske Bank, and the European Investment Bank, similar to the Lake Erie Connector investment that blends public and private capital.

In 2019, the project was awarded a Connecting Europe Facility (CEF) grant worth €530.7 million to support construction works and align with a broader push for electrification in Europe under climate strategies. The CEF program also provided €8.3 million for the Celtic Interconnector’s feasibility study and initial design and pre-consultation.

Siemens Energy will build converter stations in both countries, and Paris-based global cable company Nexans will design and install a 575-km-long cable for the project.

The cable will run between East Cork, on Ireland’s southern coast, and northwestern France’s Brittany coast and will connect into substations at Knockraha in Ireland and La Martyre in France.

The Celtic Interconnector, which is expected to be operational by 2026, will be approximately 600 km (373 miles) long and have a capacity of 700 MW, similar to cross-border initiatives such as Quebec-to-New York power exports expected in 2025, which is enough to power 450,000 households.

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Thermoelectric Materials convert waste heat into electricity via the Seebeck effect; quantum computations and semiconductors accelerate discovery, enabling clean energy, higher efficiency, and scalable heat-to-power conversion from abundant, non-toxic, cost-effective compounds.

Key Points

Thermoelectric materials turn waste heat into electricity via the Seebeck effect, improving energy efficiency.

✅ Convert waste heat to electricity via the Seebeck effect

✅ Quantum computations rapidly identify high-performance candidates

✅ Target efficient, low-thermal-conductivity, non-toxic, abundant compounds

The need to transition to clean energy is apparent, urgent and inescapable. We must limit Earth’s rising temperature to within 1.5 C to avoid the worst effects of climate change — an especially daunting challenge in the face of the steadily increasing global demand for energy and the need for reliable clean power, with concepts that can generate electricity at night now being explored worldwide.

Part of the answer is using energy more efficiently. More than 72 per cent of all energy produced worldwide is lost in the form of heat, and advances in turning thermal energy into electricity could recover some of it. For example, the engine in a car uses only about 30 per cent of the gasoline it burns to move the car. The remainder is dissipated as heat.

Recovering even a tiny fraction of that lost energy would have a tremendous impact on climate change. Thermoelectric materials, which convert wasted heat into useful electricity, can help, especially as researchers pursue low-cost heat-to-electricity materials for scalable deployment.

Until recently, the identification of these materials had been slow. My colleagues and I have used quantum computations — a computer-based modelling approach to predict materials’ properties — to speed up that process and identify more than 500 thermoelectric materials that could convert excess heat to electricity, and help improve energy efficiency.

Making great strides towards broad applications
The transformation of heat into electrical energy by thermoelectric materials is based on the “Seebeck effect.” In 1826, German physicist Thomas Johann Seebeck observed that exposing the ends of joined pieces of dissimilar metals to different temperatures generated a magnetic field, which was later recognized to be caused by an electric current.

Shortly after his discovery, metallic thermoelectric generators were fabricated to convert heat from gas burners into an electric current. But, as it turned out, metals exhibit only a low Seebeck effect — they are not very efficient at converting heat into electricity.

In 1929, the Russian scientist Abraham Ioffe revolutionized the field of thermoelectricity. He observed that semiconductors — materials whose ability to conduct electricity falls between that of metals (like copper) and insulators (like glass) — exhibit a significantly higher Seebeck effect than metals, boosting thermoelectric efficiency 40-fold, from 0.1 per cent to four per cent.

This discovery led to the development of the first widely used thermoelectric generator, the Russian lamp — a kerosene lamp that heated a thermoelectric material to power a radio.

Are we there yet?
Today, thermoelectric applications range from energy generation in space probes to cooling devices in portable refrigerators, and include emerging thin-film waste-heat harvesters for electronics as well. For example, space explorations are powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, converting the heat from naturally decaying plutonium into electricity. In the movie The Martian, for example, a box of plutonium saved the life of the character played by Matt Damon, by keeping him warm on Mars.

In the 2015 film, The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney (Matt Damon) digs up a buried thermoelectric generator to use the power source as a heater.

Despite this vast diversity of applications, wide-scale commercialization of thermoelectric materials is still limited by their low efficiency.

What’s holding them back? Two key factors must be considered: the conductive properties of the materials, and their ability to maintain a temperature difference, as seen in nighttime electricity from cold concepts, which makes it possible to generate electricity.

The best thermoelectric material would have the electronic properties of semiconductors and the poor heat conduction of glass. But this unique combination of properties is not found in naturally occurring materials. We have to engineer them, drawing on advances such as carbon nanotube energy harvesters to guide design choices.

Searching for a needle in a haystack
In the past decade, new strategies to engineer thermoelectric materials have emerged due to an enhanced understanding of their underlying physics. In a recent study in Nature Materials, researchers from Seoul National University, Aachen University and Northwestern University reported they had engineered a material called tin selenide with the highest thermoelectric performance to date, nearly twice that of 20 years ago. But it took them nearly a decade to optimize it.

To speed up the discovery process, my colleagues and I have used quantum calculations to search for new thermoelectric candidates with high efficiencies. We searched a database containing thousands of materials to look for those that would have high electronic qualities and low levels of heat conduction, based on their chemical and physical properties. These insights helped us find the best materials to synthesize and test, and calculate their thermoelectric efficiency.

We are almost at the point where thermoelectric materials can be widely applied, but first we need to develop much more efficient materials. With so many possibilities and variables, finding the way forward is like searching for a tiny needle in an enormous haystack.

Just as a metal detector can zero in on a needle in a haystack, quantum computations can accelerate the discovery of efficient thermoelectric materials. Such calculations can accurately predict electron and heat conduction (including the Seebeck effect) for thousands of materials and unveil the previously hidden and highly complex interactions between those properties, which can influence a material’s efficiency.

Large-scale applications will require themoelectric materials that are inexpensive, non-toxic and abundant. Lead and tellurium are found in today’s thermoelectric materials, but their cost and negative environmental impact make them good targets for replacement.

Quantum calculations can be applied in a way to search for specific sets of materials using parameters such as scarcity, cost and efficiency, and insights can even inform exploratory devices that generate electricity out of thin air in parallel fields. Although those calculations can reveal optimum thermoelectric materials, synthesizing the materials with the desired properties remains a challenge.

A multi-institutional effort involving government-run laboratories and universities in the United States, Canada and Europe has revealed more than 500 previously unexplored materials with high predicted thermoelectric efficiency. My colleagues and I are currently investigating the thermoelectric performance of those materials in experiments, and have already discovered new sources of high thermoelectric efficiency.

Those initial results strongly suggest that further quantum computations can pinpoint the most efficient combinations of materials to make clean energy from wasted heat and the avert the catastrophe that looms over our planet.

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Electric Buses reduce urban emissions and noise, but require charging infrastructure, grid upgrades, and depot redesigns; they offer lower operating costs and simpler maintenance, with range limits influencing routes, schedules, and on-route fast charging.

Key Points

Battery-electric buses cut emissions and noise while lowering operating and maintenance costs for transit agencies.

✅ Lower emissions, noise; improved rider experience

✅ Requires charging, grid upgrades, depot redesigns

✅ Range limits affect routes; on-route fast charging helps

In lots of ways, the electric bus feels like a technology whose time has come. Transportation is responsible for about a quarter of global emissions, and those emissions are growing faster than in any other sector. While buses are just a small slice of the worldwide vehicle fleet, they have an outsize effect on the environment. That’s partly because they’re so dirty—one Bogotá bus fleet made up just 5 percent of the city’s total vehicles, but a quarter of its CO2, 40 percent of nitrogen oxide, and more than half of all its particulate matter vehicle emissions. And because buses operate exactly where the people are concentrated, we feel the effects that much more acutely.

Enter the electric bus. Depending on the “cleanliness” of the electric grid into which they’re plugged, e-buses are much better for the environment. They’re also just straight up nicer to be around: less vibration, less noise, zero exhaust. Plus, in the long term, e-buses have lower operating costs, and related efforts like US school bus electrification are gathering pace too.

So it makes sense that global e-bus sales increased by 32 percent last year, according to a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, as the age of electric cars accelerates across markets worldwide. “You look across the electrification of cars, trucks—it’s buses that are leading this revolution,” says David Warren, the director of sustainable transportation at bus manufacturer New Flyer.

Today, about 17 percent of the world’s buses are electric—425,000 in total. But 99 percent of them are in China, where a national mandate promotes all sorts of electric vehicles. In North America, a few cities have bought a few electric buses, or at least run limited pilots, to test the concept out, and early deployments like Edmonton's first e-bus offer useful lessons as systems ramp up. California has even mandated that by 2029 all buses purchased by its mass transit agencies be zero-emission.

But given all the benefits of e-buses, why aren’t there more? And why aren’t they everywhere?

“We want to be responsive, we want to be innovative, we want to pilot new technologies and we’re committed to doing so as an agency,” says Becky Collins, the manager of corporate initiative at the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority, which is currently on its second e-bus pilot program. “But if the diesel bus was a first-generation car phone, we’re verging on smartphone territory right now. It’s not as simple as just flipping a switch.”

One reason is trepidation about the actual electric vehicle. Some of the major bus manufacturers are still getting over their skis, production-wise. During early tests in places like Belo Horizonte, Brazil, e-buses had trouble getting over steep hills with full passenger loads. Albuquerque, New Mexico, canceled a 15-bus deal with the Chinese manufacturer BYD after finding equipment problems during testing. (The city also sued). Today’s buses get around 225 miles per charge, depending on topography and weather conditions, which means they have to re-up about once a day on a shorter route in a dense city. That’s an issue in a lot of places.

If you want to buy an electric bus, you need to buy into an entire electric bus system. The vehicle is just the start.

The number one thing people seem to forget about electric buses is that they need to get charged, and emerging projects such as a bus depot charging hub illustrate how infrastructure can scale. “We talk to many different organizations that get so fixated on the vehicles,” says Camron Gorguinpour, the global senior manager for the electric vehicles at the World Resources Institute, a research organization, which last month released twin reports on electric bus adoption. “The actual charging stations get lost in the mix.”

But charging stations are expensive—about $50,000 for your standard depot-based one. On-route charging stations, an appealing option for longer bus routes, can be two or three times that. And that’s not even counting construction costs. Or the cost of new land: In densely packed urban centers, movements inside bus depots can be tightly orchestrated to accommodate parking and fueling. New electric bus infrastructure means rethinking limited space, and operators can look to Toronto's TTC e-bus fleet for practical lessons on depot design. And it’s a particular pain when agencies are transitioning between diesel and electric buses. “The big issue is just maintaining two sets of fueling infrastructure,” says Hanjiro Ambrose, a doctoral student at UC Davis who studies transportation technology and policy.

“We talk to many different organizations that get so fixated on the vehicles. The actual charging stations get lost in the mix as the American EV boom gathers pace across sectors.”

Then agencies also have to get the actual electricity to their charging stations. This involves lengthy conversations with utilities about grid upgrades, rethinking how systems are wired, occasionally building new substations, and, sometimes, cutting deals on electric output, since electric truck fleets will also strain power systems in parallel. Because an entirely electrified bus fleet? It’s a lot to charge. Warren, the New Flyer executive, estimates it could take 150 megawatt-hours of electricity to keep a 300-bus depot charged up throughout the day. Your typical American household, by contrast, consumes 7 percent of that—per year. “That’s a lot of work by the utility company,” says Warren.

For cities outside of China—many of them still testing out electric buses and figuring out how they fit into their larger fleets—learning about what it takes to run one is part of the process. This, of course, takes money. It also takes time. Optimists say e-buses are more of a question of when than if. Bloomberg New Energy Finance projects that just under 60 percent of all fleet buses will be electric by 2040, compared to under 40 percent of commercial vans and 30 percent of passenger vehicles.

Which means, of course, that the work has just started. “With new technology, it always feels great when it shows up,” says Ambrose. “You really hope that first mile is beautiful, because the shine will come off. That’s always true.”

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Rising Greenhouse Gas Concentrations drive climate change, with CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide surging; WMO data show higher radiative forcing, elevated pre-industrial baselines, and persistent atmospheric concentrations despite Paris Agreement emissions pledges.

Key Points

Increasing atmospheric CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide levels that raise radiative forcing and drive warming.

✅ WMO data show CO2 at 407.8 ppm in 2018, above decade average

✅ Methane and nitrous oxide surged, elevating total radiative forcing

✅ Concentrations differ from emissions; sinks absorb about half

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says the increase in CO2 was just above the average rise recorded over the last decade.

Levels of other warming gases, such as methane and nitrous oxide, have also surged by above average amounts.

Since 1990 there's been an increase of 43% in the warming effect on the climate of long lived greenhouse gases.

The WMO report looks at concentrations of warming gases in the atmosphere rather than just emissions.

The difference between the two is that emissions refer to the amount of gases that go up into the atmosphere from the use of fossil fuels, such as burning coal for coal-fired electricity generation and from deforestation.

Concentrations are what's left in the air after a complex series of interactions between the atmosphere, the oceans, the forests and the land. About a quarter of all carbon emissions are absorbed by the seas, and a similar amount by land and trees, while technologies like carbon capture are being explored to remove CO2.

Using data from monitoring stations in the Arctic and all over the world, researchers say that in 2018 concentrations of CO2 reached 407.8 parts per million (ppm), up from 405.5ppm a year previously.

This increase was above the average for the last 10 years and is 147% of the "pre-industrial" level in 1750.

The WMO also records concentrations of other warming gases, including methane and nitrous oxide, and some countries have reported declines in certain potent gases, as noted in US greenhouse gas controls reports, though global levels remain elevated. About 40% of the methane emitted into the air comes from natural sources, such as wetlands, with 60% from human activities, including cattle farming, rice cultivation and landfill dumps.

Methane is now at 259% of the pre-industrial level and the increase seen over the past year was higher than both the previous annual rate and the average over the past 10 years.

Nitrous oxide is emitted from natural and human sources, including from the oceans and from fertiliser-use in farming. According to the WMO, it is now at 123% of the levels that existed in 1750.

Last year's increase in concentrations of the gas, which can also harm the ozone layer, was bigger than the previous 12 months and higher than the average of the past decade.

What concerns scientists is the overall warming impact of all these increasing concentrations. Known as total radiative forcing, this effect has increased by 43% since 1990, and is not showing any indication of stopping.

There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline, in greenhouse gases concentration in the atmosphere despite all the commitments under the Paris agreement on climate change and the ongoing global energy transition efforts," said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

"We need to translate the commitments into action and increase the level of ambition for the sake of the future welfare of mankind," he added.

"It is worth recalling that the last time the Earth experienced a comparable concentration of CO2 was three to five million years ago. Back then, the temperature was 2-3C warmer, sea level was 10-20m higher than now," said Mr Taalas.

The UN Environment Programme will report shortly on the gap between what actions countries are taking to cut carbon, for example where Australia's emissions rose 2% recently, and what needs to be done to keep under the temperature targets agreed in the Paris climate pact.

Preliminary findings from this study, published during the UN Secretary General's special climate summit last September, indicated that emissions continued to rise during 2018, although global emissions flatlined in 2019 according to the IEA.

Both reports will help inform delegates from almost 200 countries who will meet in Madrid next week for COP25, following COP24 in Katowice the previous year, the annual round of international climate talks.

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