Thursday, 11 January 2018
Electricity consumption needed to create cryptocurrencies this year could be as great as or even exceed the entire electricity consumption of Argentina and be a growth driver for renewable energy producers, said Morgan Stanley.
Cryptocurrencies are mined by solving complex math problems whose solutions are used to validate new transactions that are added to the blockchain ledger. And all that mining requires a large amount of computational energy use.
“Bitcoin power demand in 2018 (c.120-140TWh equating to 0.6% of world consumption, or consumption of Argentina) will, in our view, be bigger than our projected global EV demand in 2025 (c.125TWh), but is still small on an absolute basis and will not likely have a material impact on utility stocks any time soon,” analysts at Morgan Stanley led by Nicholas Ashworth wrote in a note on Wednesday
“If crypt...