As the price of bitcoin has climbed, so has its environmental cost

BITCOIN HAS gained many admirers since its launch in 2009. Once the domain of anarchists and Redditors, the digital currency has since piqued the interest of hedge-fund managers and tech entrepreneurs—most notably Elon Musk, the eccentric founder of Tesla and SpaceX. In February Tesla announced that it had invested $1.5bn in the cryptocurrency and would begin accepting the tokens as payment for its electric cars. Overnight, bitcoin’s price shot to a record-shattering $46,000. The total value of bitcoins in circulation, at more than $900bn, now exceeds Facebook’s market capitalisation.

But as the price of bitcoin has soared, so has its thirst for energy. According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, a tool created by researchers at the British university, in the week ending May 13th bitcoin mining used electricity at a rate equivalent to 150 terawatt-hours per year (see chart), more than the entire annual energy consumption of the Netherlands. Other studies have yielded similar results. In March Alex de Vries, a Dutch economist and the creator of another popular measure of bitcoin energy use, estimated that the cryptocurrency may gobble up as much energy as all the data centres in the world combined.