El Salvador has an abundance of volcanoes. But it also requires the supporting infrastructure to generate electricity.
El Salvador’s plan of using Geothermal Energy to mine Bitcoin may not be on track to achieve its objective, Ricardo Navarro an ecologist from the country told the Telegraph.
He believes that monetarily, oil is more efficient than Geothermal Energy. Therefore, El Salvador may not be able to meet the electricity targets to mine bitcoin in a cost-efficient manner.
“Geothermal still costs more than oil, otherwise we would already be using more of it. What will end up happening is that we will just be buying more oil,” warned Navarro, who heads the El Salvadoran Center of Appropriate Technology, a local think tank.
He has expressed apprehensions about President Nayib Bukele’s dream of building the carbon emission-free Bitcoin City alongside volcanoes.
The Goldman Prize winner – the green movement’s equivalent of the Nobel – draws the analogy that “talking about building this city beside a volcano is like thinking you are rich because you live next to a bank. Geothermal Energy doesn’t need volcanoes. It needs groundwater, steam. But we already have problems with not enough water in El Salvador.”
So, volcanoes need supporting infrastructure and resources in order to generate electricity. Just an abundance of volcanoes is not enough.
Marit Brommer, ExecutiveDirector of the Germany-based International Geothermal Association, believes that it could take 2-3 years or even longer before any electricity is generated. The supporting infrastructure takes time to build.
The world consumes an enormous amount of energy each year just to provide necessities. Renewable sources of energy are the way to go forward for generating electricity. They may cost upwards of conventional sources in the short term, but the world has to switch to them for a longer team, rendering them feasible.
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