Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Thursday that audits of renewable energy used by large Bitcoin miners could help assuage concerns about the cryptocurrency’s environmental impact.
“Recent extreme energy usage growth could not possibly have been done so fast with renewables,” Musk said in response to a tweet from Ark Investment director of research Brett Winton about the potential that Bitcoin mining has to foster the wider use of solar and battery systems on the power grid. “This question is easily resolved if the top 10 hashing orgs just post audited numbers of renewable energy vs not.”
Subscribe to The Ledger for expert weekly analysis on fintech’s big stories, delivered free to your inbox.Musk, responding to another Twitter user who asked about ideal energy usage in crypto mining, implied that even his favored Dogecoin still had some room for improvement and said he favored a ratio of 0.1kWh, “calculated as total energy used by system divided by max transaction rate.”