"El Salvador sets up bitcoin mining equipment at geothermal plant", 30 September 2021

...The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, this week posted a video, which briefly shows workers delivering and installing cryptocurrency mining equipment at a geothermal power plant.

Earlier in September, El Salvador became the first country in the world to make bitcoin legal tender, and introduced a digital wallet for citizens to use for transactions.

The plans to use a geothermal plant to power the energy-intensive process of bitcoin mining were announced by Bukele in early June. The president at time said that the country’s state-owned geothermal electric company had dug a well that will provide some 95 MW of power from volcanoes for the mining.

Global bitcoin mining has consumed some 99.1 TWh so far this year, according to a tracker by Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. To put this figure into perspective, that is more than what the nation of the Philippines consumed, the university states...