Cathie Wood believes that recent environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations related to bitcoin’s energy intake will only encourage the adoption of renewable mining and solar energy.
At an ARK Invest webinar on Tuesday, the prominent fund manager said the controversy was “a smart thing to do” and reiterated previous claims that bitcoin’s energy consumption is a net positive outcome for renewable energy adoption.
“Half the solution is to perceive the ‘problem,'” Wood said. “I think we’ll see an increase in solar power due to bitcoin mining much faster than we would have noticed without this controversy. “
The document, titled “Bitcoin is the key to an abundant and blank force future,” states that bitcoin has “network purposes as an exclusive strength customer that can allow the company to deploy much more solar and wind power generation capacity. “
Wood referred to his most productive crypto analyst, Yassine Elmandjra, for a breakdown of those claims at Tuesday’s webinar.
Elmandjra said:
“With bitcoin mining built into a solar battery system, power providers can necessarily play the balance between electric power costs and bitcoin costs, and then sell the excess solar power and get almost all the electric power demands out of the grid without reducing profitability. of the system. “
“You can see as bitcoin mining evolves, the duration of the solar formula increases and it is able to meet a higher percentage of the needs of the network,” Elmandjra continued. “So, in the absence of bitcoin mining, you can see that renewables can only meet 20% of the grid’s needs, and then, in the most sensitive part to the right of the graph, adding bitcoin, renewables can meet up to 99% of the grid’s energy needs. “
The analyst discussed recent expansions in renewable energy bitcoin mining and solar expansion, stating that ARK has gained “many incoming flows” from corporations to expand “this precise system. “
Despite ARK Invest’s claims about a long-term sun caused by bitcoin mining, a lot of criticism remains: according to Cambridge data, around 39% of proof-of-work extraction lately is powered by renewable energy, and the entire bitcoin network uses more energy per year than the entire Netherlands.
Statistics like this have led critics like Nobel laureate Paul Krugman to denigrate Bitcoin for its environmental impact, others.
Krugman has been widely criticized for his opinion column on bitcoin, and Twitter users noted that the economist once said, “around 2005, it will be transparent that the effect of the internet on the economy has not been greater than that. “of the fax machine”.