industryterm:energy use

  • Norway awards #Equinor license to build #CO2_storage under seabed | Agricultural Commodities | Reuters
    https://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL8N1ZB3BN

    Equinor has won a license to develop carbon dioxide (CO2) storage under the North Sea, Norway’s oil ministry said on Friday, part of a push to combat climate change.

    Equinor is expected to submit a development plan this year, with parliament making a final decision in 2020 or 2021.

    Proponents of carbon capture and storage (CCS) say countries need the technology to help fulfil pledges made around the time of the breakthrough Paris climate change agreement in 2015.

    But environmentalists say is a costly technology that will perpetuate the status quo when rapid and deep cuts to energy use are needed to limit global warming.

    #CSC #captage_de_CO2
    ex-#Statoil

  • Bitcoin’s energy use got studied, and you libertarian nerds look even worse than usual | Grist
    https://grist.org/article/bitcoins-energy-use-got-studied-and-you-libertarian-nerds-look-even-worse-tha

    It’s expected to double again by the end of the year, according to a new peer-reviewed study out Wednesday. And if that happens, bitcoin would be gobbling up 0.5 percent of the world’s electricity, about as much as the Netherlands.

    That’s a troubling trajectory, especially for a world that should be working overtime to root out energy waste and fight climate change. By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.

  • Can blockchain technology help poor people around the world?
    http://theconversation.com/can-blockchain-technology-help-poor-people-around-the-world-76059

    In my work as a scholar of business and technology focusing on the impact of blockchain and other modern technologies such as cloud computing, big data and the Internet of Things on poor people, I see four main ways blockchain systems are already beginning to connect some of the world’s poorest people with the global economy.

    The downside of blockchain
    http://www.infodrivenbusiness.com/post.php?post=/2016/04/29/the-downside-of-blockchain

    by Robert Hillard

    Imagine an invention that deliberately wasted resources. Maybe a car that burns oil just to create smoke that is easy to see or an electric light that uses twice as much energy to avoid burning out. That’s exactly what blockchain is doing, consuming large amounts of electricity for no purpose other than making fraud prohibitively expensive.

    I recently had the privilege of collaborating with my colleagues from the Australian Deloitte Centre for the Edge on a report looking into distributed ledgers and the blockchain technology. Reading the result, it is striking how far we still have to go to invent our digital business future.

    As a quick reminder, blockchain is a technology to support the exchange of value or contracts in an environment where anonymity is important and no one is to be trusted. The best known application of blockchain is in the exchange of Bitcoins, a virtual currency.

    Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index - Digiconomist
    https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

    Key Network Statistics

    Description Value
    Bitcoin’s current estimated annual electricity consumption* (TWh) 51.82
    Annualized global mining revenues $8,109,412,566
    Annualized estimated global mining costs $2,590,786,398
    Country closest to Bitcoin in terms of electricity consumption Uzbekistan
    Estimated electricity used over the previous day (KWh) 141,960,899
    Implied Watts per GH/s 0.232
    Total Network Hashrate in PH/s (1,000,000 GH/s) 25,475
    Electricity consumed per transaction (KWh) 772.00
    Number of U.S. households that could be powered by Bitcoin 4,797,753
    Number of U.S. households powered for 1 day by the electricity consumed for a single transaction 26.09
    Bitcoin’s electricity consumption as a percentage of the world’s electricity consumption 0.23%
    Annual carbon footprint (kt of CO2) 25,390
    Carbon footprint per transaction (kg of CO2) 378.2

    Bitcoin’s insane energy consumption, explained | Ars Technica
    https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained

    Bitcoin’s energy use should decline in the long run

    Blockchain scalability - O’Reilly Media
    https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/blockchain-scalability

    The three main stumbling blocks to blockchain scalability are:

    1. The tendency toward centralization with a growing blockchain: the larger the blockchain grows, the larger the requirements become for storage, bandwidth, and computational power that must be spent by “full nodes” in the network, leading to a risk of much higher centralization if the blockchain becomes large enough that only a few nodes are able to process a block.
    2. The bitcoin-specific issue that the blockchain has a built-in hard limit of 1 megabyte per block (about 10 minutes), and removing this limit requires a “hard fork” (ie. backward-incompatible change) to the bitcoin protocol.
    3. The high processing fees currently paid for bitcoin transactions, and the potential for those fees to increase as the network grows. We won’t discuss this too much, but see here for more detail.

    #énergie #environnement #gaspillage #électricité #bitcoin #blockchain #pauvreté #économie

  • How Cycling Can Save Cities Money and Emissions - Institute for Transportation and Development Policy
    https://www.itdp.org/how-cycling-can-save-cities-money-and-emissions

    "The incredible potential of dramatically increasing cycling is captured for the first time in a scientific study carried out by ITDP and UC Davis. A new report, A Global High Shift Cycling Scenario, shows that cycling and e-biking can cut energy use and CO2 emissions of urban transport by up to 10% by 2050 compared to current estimations, while saving society trillions of dollars."(Permalink)

    #mobilité #vélo #environnement

  • Smart, social energy : Can software change our energy habits ? | BBC News
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20173641

    software to help people cut their energy use without having to spend too much time working out how to do it.

    Firms including British Gas already offer software allowing consumers to monitor and control their central heating from afar.

    The intention is to take this to the next level with a system that can analyse the energy use of every device in a home and suggest ways to use them more efficiently - or simply to replace them with better, cheaper-to-run equipment.

    #énergie #surveillance