North Vancouver to become the world’s first city heated by Bitcoin

Here’s a fun little bit of tech/energy news! Last week, the City of North Vancouver entered an agreement with a local Bitcoin mining company, and if all goes well it will become the first city in the world heated by Bitcoin. Curious about how it works? Keep reading!

Basically, Bitcoin mining is the use of computers to solve complex math problems, with the end goal of creating a new Bitcoin or verifying transactions. Over the years, these problems have gotten more difficult to solve, and now require serious hardware to perform. In a nutshell, think of an entire server of computers, running 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, doing math. Naturally, Bitcoin mining takes a lot of energy and wastes a lot of energy due to the heat generated by the servers.

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So, the city’s Lonsdale Energy Corporation partnered with a local Bitcoin mining company, MintGreen, last week. MintGreen has created ‘Digital Boilers’, which allows them to recover 96% of the energy they use and turn it back into thermal energy. MintGreen can then sell that energy back to the city, which goes into powering homes, buildings, and industrial processes.

While it’s not anywhere near the scale of, say, hydroelectric power, the partnership claims that the move will remove some 20,000 tons of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) when compared to using natural gas over the same period of time. What’s more, it’s a novel way to deal with an emerging issue, so we see it as a win!

For more information, you can check out the official press release right here.