US Government Launches New Attempt to Gather Data on Electricity Usage of Bitcoin Mining

By Keaton Peters

The fast-growing cryptocurrency industry is a major consumer of electricity, but no one—not even the U.S. government—knows exactly how much energy goes into the armada of computers used to ‘mine’ Bitcoin and other digital assets. The U.S. Energy Information Agency estimates that cryptocurrency mining uses between 0.6 percent and 2.3 percent of all electricity per year, but the agency may soon be able to access more precise information.