Huge energy consumption required in blockchain authentication and the consequent environmental impacts have cast doubt on the sustainability of Bitcoin and Proof of Work based Blockchain. These concerns have motivated the development of 'Green Mining initiatives' to fuel the participants (miners) with electricity generated by renewable resources. This presentation will go through the foundation of Bitcoin Blockchain and report on the energy profile of the network. Then it will outline how renewable asset owners can become the future miners and profit from it. It will also highlight how this can help the grid operator to tackle the duck curve and provide an update on new application of Blockchain technologies in the energy sector. Proof of work algorithms are deemed to be unsustainable since they consume an enormous amount of energy (the majority of which is provided by non-green sources). The Green Mining Initiatives are seeking alternative green sources for this unique new demand which could also encourage new investment in renewable projects.

Bitcoin Blockchain uses a decentralized cryptographic validation process to validate transactions known as Proof-of-Work. Numerous processing units (CPUs, GPUs, ASICs, and FPGAs) known as miners compete with each other to solve a puzzle and mine new Bitcoins and gain the reward. By this process, a fully decentralised and trustless network of peer-to-peer transactions is established. However, validating through proof of work consumes a high level of electricity. Due to decentralised nature of miners, it is hard to estimate the actual energy consumption of the network but it has been estimated that Bitcoin miners’ electricity consumption profile is more than the energy consumption of some countries (200 TWh annual). Bitcoin is also a unique type of electricity buyer with specific characteristics such as being location agnostic. This could be of paramount interest for systems operators to tackle the intermittent nature of many renewable sources such as solar and wind. Renewable plus storage projects could be augmented with Bitcoin mining system. Bitcoin miners can act as a flexible load that could potentially solve the intermittency issue and paves the way for more renewable project to become profitable and consequently expedite the integration of more renewable sources.

Speaker

Dr Ali Kharrazi - Adjunct Lecturer UWA / Senior Planning Engineer Western Power
Ali Kharrazi holds a bachelor degree in Electronic Engineering and a Master of Science degree in Control Engineering from Iran where he worked as Project Engineer and Telecom Engineer for various industries. He received his Honor degree in Electrical Power Engineering from Murdoch University in 2015 and his PhD from University of Western Australia in 2021. His research areas are renewable integration, DERs and Energy Blockchain. He is currently an adjunct lecturer at University of Western Australia and works as Senior Planning Engineer in Western Power.