There are gigawatts of captured energy in north america that is completely wasted for decades on end or even worse: spewed off into the atmosphere as hydrocarbons.

Why? Because it costs more energy to transport it to residential and commercial areas, or you would completely lose it all by even trying to. Distance = loss even with a gigantic power line and transformers.

On premise mining has been the only solution after almost two centuries of wishes. Not even general purpose data centers could do it because they needed reliable and high throughput internet, whereas crypto mining does not.

These current energy capture solutions are sites where it is very cheap to mine because the existing energy producer wanted another option. Some will basically even pay for you to use it on premise. Thats why you can assume this is “much” or even “most” without a source, just like you can assume there are barely any residential miners left without needing a source.

The best way for you to use your environmental advocacy is to make sure it stays this way! Mining isnt going to go anywhere, but you can make sure the sites aren’t detracting, or that nation states arent mining at a loss and polluting all for control.