Blockchain has become a huge part of the global economy. It fuels billions and billions of dollars of transactions around the world. The technology underlying blockchain however has a relatively high energy-use profile, drawing attention to another new technology: environmentally responsible immersion cooling techniques like GRC’s liquid cooling tanks.

In many people’s minds, blockchain is associated with digital asset mining and cryptocurrencies. That may have been the case, but now, there are several other applications. International payments have become the number one use case, with around 16% of the blockchain market. Other key use cases include provenance or lineage at nearly 11% – the tracing and authentication of components for products.

Of the organizations making use of blockchain, 45% are developing secure information exchange. Additionally, many are using currencies like Bitcoin (the initial blockchain use case) and Ethereum. There are now around 10,000 different cryptocurrencies! This represents a massive increase over the last few years, as blockchain technology has gone mainstream. This rapidly increasing use, however, poses a problem for energy management.

The Issue with Blockchain and Crypto Mining

The issue with blockchain, including its most prevalent use in mining cryptocurrencies, is its immense energy consumption. Bitcoin and other applications conduct processor-intensive, hash calculations to enable people and institutions to make transactions autonomously. The entire network uses several gigawatts, or billions of watts of electricity to power this functionality – more than some countries!

If you add up all of that power use over the year, it totals 122.87 terawatt-hours for Bitcoin alone. That’s billions of dollars of electricity, and since over 60% of the world’s electricity is still produced using fossil fuels that electricity consumption means a tremendous amount of toxic fumes and greenhouse gases. And that’s just Bitcoin. Other cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications use comparable amounts.

While efforts towards more efficient blockchain technologies are underway, for now, they remain among the more prevailing polluters of these new processes. The energy use of Bitcoin and other blockchain technologies is only increasing, as these become ever more prevalent in society. As people become responsive to green issues like sustainability and greenhouse gas emissions, it’s critically important to consider the indirect environmental cost of blockchain.

Is the Promise of Green Energy the Silver Lining?

Green energy, the carefully-considered production of power to protect the environment offers an exciting prospect for the world of crypto. Clean electricity from solar or hydro cuts emissions on the production side. On the consumption side, clean tech like GRC’s liquid immersion systems makes blockchain more environmentally friendly.

For example, you can run the processor-intensive calculations for blockchain in a GRC HashRaQ that cuts energy requirements by as much as 90%! How? By deploying liquid immersion cooling technology that is 1,200 times more efficient than traditional air cooling. The same technique also enables the GRC HashTank to perform even more efficiently at 95% energy reduction in a shipping container!

Back on the green energy production side, startups are working to enable people to select renewable electricity sources on the grid through blockchain. In Estonia, people can already access real-time data on power production sources. Green power will likely soon make electricity more affordable and resilient, not to mention sustainable, through the intelligence of blockchain smart contracts.

Bringing together the generation and use of electricity, blockchain can enable people to see instantly how much we are using and where. Leveraging real data, blockchain enhances reliability to enable renewable energy producers and users to make more efficient use of resources.

You can see with confidence that you’re using clean electricity. The blockchain networks allow the electricity market to function transparently, allocating production and use to make the most of green sources like biomass. This completes the circle, from production with green energy to use with smart tools like immersion cooling.

Immersion Cooling Techniques: What You Should Know

GRC’s immersion cooling techniques work smoothly with blockchain. As blockchain continues its formidable march into more corners of the economy, data centers need to respond with effective cooling techniques to handle the heat.

The intense computational requirements of blockchain push servers to the max. This imposes a price constraint as cooling comprises one of the main costs of a data center. Air-cooled data centers, quite simply, cost too much for crypto mining to be profitable.

Liquid immersion cooling offers superior performance at a far lower cost. Upfront data center costs can be cut in half while eliminating 95% of cooling costs! This technology works efficiently anywhere, unlike older air-cooling methods.

Whether you’re building a new data center or have a spare piece of land, you can easily deploy immersion cooling to slash costs. The HashTank portable data center and the HashRaQ rack system both provide industry-leading green cooling for your blockchain applications.

For the most intensive workloads out there, even at well over 100 kilowatts per rack, immersion cooling effortlessly dissipates heat. Liquid is the ideal environment for removing waste heat. This approach also simplifies site requirements to save even more money. You’ll be amazed at how clean, quiet, and efficient the immersion cooling systems are.

In addition to the lower costs and greater cooling capacity, immersion cooling techniques offer protection against environmental contaminants such as dust and corrosion. Furthermore, this approach does not require fans or many other moving parts from traditional cooling, thus extending the life of your expensive hardware.

Immersion cooling will take literally billions of tons of pollutants out of the environment by displacing messy air cooling while enabling the spread of blockchain. All things considered, liquid immersion cooling is a win-win solution. From day one through the total cost of ownership, you’ll see a handsome ROI and a more rewarding outcome for the environment.

Get The “Greener” Cooling Solution With GRC

While blockchain applications like cryptocurrencies and digital asset mining have increased the demands on data centers and the power supply, GRC now offers the technology along with the expertise to manage these cooling demands effectively.

GRC’s modular cooling systems are cost-effective to install and operate. They produce a deeper cooling of your crypto rigs or other data-intensive IT infrastructure. You can upgrade to liquid anywhere, from a state-of-the-art data center to an unused area in a brewery!

Join the green revolution. Get the cost savings while doing your bit for the long-term sustainability of our environment. Learn how GRC’s liquid immersion cooling tech can make your data center smarter and greener while keeping revenues in the black.