Illegal grow-ops use 1 per cent of total power
"People growing marijuana indoors use 1 per cent of the U.S. electricity supply," the San Francisco Business Times reports, "and they create 17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year not counting the smoke exhaled" according to a report by Evan Mills, an energy analyst at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
In order to produce some 17,000 metric tons of marijuana this year, Mills estimates authorized growers will use $5-billion US worth of energy. That works out to the output of seven big electric power plants.
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How Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble
LONDON - 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.
And the electricity the Bitcoin miners use overwhelmingly comes from polluting sources.
The CCAF team surveys the people who manage the Bitcoin network around the world on their energy use and found that…
