Electric. Heck even lawn maintenance materials are being used by electricity more often. Add cars, appliances from gas to electricity (eventually), we’re going to increase our electric consumption by a lot.

Converted my lawn equipment to electric years ago. Less maintenance, quieter operation.

in the equation?

green generation on scale with what China is doing. Hell, even the UK which just closed its last coal-fired plant last week.

China is building six times more new coal plants than other countries, report finds

China permitted more coal power plants last year than any time in the last seven years, according to a new report released this week. It's the equivalent of about two new coal power plants per week. The report by energy data organizations Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.

https://www.npr.org/2023/03/02/1160441919/china-is-building-six-times-more-new-coal-plants-than-other-countries-report-fin

But that doesn't change fact that they put us to shame on green energy deployment.

Some of these "mines" use more power than small towns. Guess who will be paying for big business's AI investment...in more than one way!

sort of scale as AI, and the end users aren't being correctly billed for it, so every day consumers (that's you and me) are paying increased rates for consumption and new generation plants.

All to support what is essentially a Ponzi scheme.

But assumed that I just lacked any relevant expertise in that area. Descriptions of crypto 'mining' sounds like it uses enormous amounts of computational energy and time to solve some specialized type of algorithm. But the algorithm doesn't produce anything remotely useful, aside from its own uniqueness.

If anyone has a more accurate description, that would be helpful. I am pretty sure I have merely displayed my ignorance.

But the main point of the OP is that Crypto uses enormous amounts of energy. Then the servers and server rooms need to be well air-conditioned, sucking up even more energy.

and Trump Media shares TFG claims have value.

The actual cost of generating the unique number that Crypto claims to value is not paid for by anyone involved in computing it. They don't own the software nor the servers, and the if the power is paid for at all it is far below the rate it should be.

The whole thing got started as a distributed computing task spread over thousands of individual users. It evolved into a way to dodge taxation, along with financial regulation. It now powers significant political donations to both GOP and Democratic Presidential, Congressional, Senate and state legislative candidates.