I want to let you all know about what I think is one of the coolest yet most under-appreciated ways to reduce waste and improve one’s impact on the world.
A bit of background first: Every watt of electricity you use in your house turns into heat. A blender is just as efficient at turning electricity into heat as a space heater. It sounds counter-intuitive, but ask your grade school physics teacher and you’ll find that the conservation of energy is not a controversial topic in physics. If you have electric heat such as electric baseboards or space heaters (NOT heat pumps since they are >100% efficient), you can heat your house with computers and spend the exact same amount as your normal heat bill but also get some useful computational work done in the process. If you are spending 50W on a space heater, you could instead dump that 50W into your computer. You pay for and get 50W of heat either way, but only the computer does some work along the way.
So really, if you are pouring electricity into a space heater or electric baseboard heater, it’s a waste, because that same electricity could be doing some useful work.
What kind of work? Well, I donate my computer’s time to BOINC. BOINC lemmy at [email protected] . (The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) is a free and open-source program that has been around for decades and has delivered teraflops of computing to scientists on a daily basis for absolutely free. It runs on Windows, MacOS, Linux, even Android (just be careful about heat on Android!). You don’t need to be computer-savvy to run it.
BOINC has been used to map the universe, detect asteroids, search for aliens (remember seti@home?), fight cancer, and publish hundreds of scientific papers. The world’s largest particle accelerator (large hadron collider at CERN) even has a project you can compute for, who knows, you may find a new subatomic particle! Anybody with a computer, raspberry pi, or android can contribute their CPU or GPU to the cause and pick which projects they want to contribute to.
One of the awesome things about BOINC is that any scientists with interesting research can instantly access massive amounts of computational power for free. They don’t need time on a supercomputer or institutional backing, all they need is an interesting research concept and a spare laptop to run the server on.
I have been running BOINC for many years and find it very gratifying, I love getting to see the results. In winter, 100% of my indoor heat comes from computing for science.
You could mine bitcoins too.
Yep absolutely. If you consider the cost of electricity a “sunken cost” regardless, you can mine crypto and always turn a profit though your total monthly revenue might be on the order of dollars a month even with heating an entire apartment. Many crypto miners utilize waste heat in some fashion or another. They also tend to flock to places with the cheapest electricity, which tends to be over-provisioned renewables which are needed to balance the totally imbalanced demand curves which every power grid is subject to. If you want to run your grid on 100% renewables, that means that your average production must exceed your peak demand. Which also means during non-peak demand, you now are producing more energy than you need, since supply and demand must be constantly balanced on a minute-by-minute basis to prevent grid failure, this means at times the electric rate may actually go negative as the power companies need somebody to soak up the extra supply since turning on/off production has some costs and delays associated with it. Bitcoin mining takes up around .1% of global energy usage, mostly from renewable sources.
Personally, I’d rather donate my computational power to science. But there are cryptos which will reward you for scientific computation so you can have it both ways. [email protected] rewards BOINC and Folding@home for example, they have been doing that for around ten years. Basically, they asked the question “What if instead of minting coins for people calculating hashes, we did it for people calculating science?”. There’s no separate proof-of-work element so all the energy still goes to science. I collect GRC rewards because it helps a bit with the electric bill but it’s not like it makes me any real money.