Beneath grassy plains where zebras and warthogs roam, the tectonic plates of the Rift Valley are slowly breaking apart. In a few million years, this place will likely be an ocean. For now, though, all that underground activity makes it an ideal source of energy. Almost too ideal.
“We have more generation than we can use,” says Fredrick Apollo, plant manager at a local geothermal power plant, run by the Oserian Development Co.
Enter an improbable solution – bitcoin mining. Cables snake from the power plant to an aluminum shipping container a few miles away. There, five dozen shoebox-sized machines whir day and night, sucking up electricity that Oserian would otherwise discard to make new units of the cryptocurrency.
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Worldwide, bitcoin mining uses as much electricity as the country of Poland. Now, one company is offering an idea to cut cryptocurrency’s carbon footprint while also making renewable energy more easily accessible in Africa.
Bitcoin mining requires a notoriously large amount of electricity, as much as the country of Poland uses. Only about a third of that energy comes from renewables or nuclear.
In an effort to change that, and to find new sources of cheap energy, more cryptocurrency mining companies are setting up shop next to sources of renewable energy. They sponge up the excess energy that, unlike fossil fuels, can be difficult to stockpile or transport.
That is also an attractive proposal for struggling renewable power providers, though experts warn it is only a short-term solution to their storage woes. But in Africa, where the focus is on generating electricity in the first place, cryptocurrency miners are unexpectedly filling a gap.
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