Trump Says He’ll Make So Much Electricity, We’ll Beg Him To Stop – CleanTechnica

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I recently came across a hilarious clip of a speech Donald Trump made. In the clip, he’s excited about electricity, and absent context, you might think he’s made some kind of massive policy reversal. I’ll get into what he’s really saying in a bit, but let’s have a laugh first:

Trump: We will be creating so much electricity that you’ll be saying, please, please, president, we don’t want any more electricity. We can’t stand it. You’ll be begging me. No more electricity, sir. We have enough. We have enough. pic.twitter.com/fFLs47APYR

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 27, 2024

On the surface, this might sound like we’d power all-electric homes, electric cars, and electric everything else because there’ll be so much electricity everywhere that we won’t know what to do with it. Don’t threaten us with a good time, Trump!

But, there’s a catch: he’s not talking to the general population. He’s talking to an audience of bitcoin enthusiasts. Rather than relying on a central bank and a banking system to provide a medium of exchange, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies rely on a decentralized network of computer processing power, encryption, and digital wallets to provide the same service money provides. To keep the whole system running, most cryptocurrencies give people incentive to provide computing power by giving them a little bit of the currency as a reward. This is known as “mining.”

But, all of this processing requires power, and the power needs to be as cheap as possible to actually make money doing cryptocurrency mining. There are a couple of ways to deal with this.

One way forward some cryptocurrencies have experimented with is lowering the needed processing power. On the hardware side, specialized chips can be used to perform crypto operations with less power, even if those chips aren’t useful for other tasks. On the software side, some cryptocurrencies have moved to less compute-intensive methods for securing the transactions, like proof of stake.

Another way to deal with this is to find cheap electricity. Bitcoin miners have actually been pretty innovative about this, doing things like capturing escaping methane gas from oil wells and using it to generate electricity to power mining. Renewables and storage have also played roles in the quest for cheaper power.

The obvious downside to all of this is that bitcoin mining can have a big environmental impact. I personally think this is a problem that has been vastly overstated and then not compared to the true impacts of running government fiat currencies. To be fair with the dollar, we’d have to not only include the power consumption of the entire United States banking system, but also all overseas facilities dealing with dollars and the costs of maintaining petrodollars, including warfare.

But, just because it’s not the big problem anti-crypto people would claim doesn’t mean it isn’t still an issue that can be improved.

Sadly, when we see people like Donald Trump talk about producing power, they’re almost never talking about solar, wind, geothermal, and battery storage. When people in his camp talk about “the grid,” they’re almost always talking about the need for more fossil fuels, even if fossil fuels are starting to be more expensive than renewables. They’d like us to believe that increased burning of fossil fuels combined with lots and lots of nuclear power would provide abundant cheap electricity.

So, we’re not seeing Donald Trump come to a better understanding of electricity. We’re only seeing him try to inflate support for his energy policies by talking to people who would like a lot of electricity. They’d be fools to believe him, though, because the power he wants to provide would end up being more expensive.

Featured image by Jennifer Sensiba.