Cathy Wood’s ARK Invest outlook on environmental impact of Bitcoin mining, and a real life example of their observation

A week ago, Cathy Wood’s ARK Invest came out on their latest outlook on the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining (see link below). According to them, Bitcoin mining will actually drive the adoption of more renewable energy, in particular solar.

https://twitter.com/arkinvest/status/1392138985082925060?s=21

Yesterday, there was a news segment in Australia reporting on the recent mass adoption of solar panels by residential households (see link below).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=opYj9MQpzEY

This mass solar adoption has caused issues where there are now too much excess solar power collected from households and are now being sent back to the grid, to a point electricity subsidies were being reduced for households (ie. households are now being charged for sending their excess solar power back to the grid). The news segment also talks about how the government is now encouraging households to install batteries (yes, Tesla batteries!) to capture this excess, rather than sending it back to the grid. My understanding is with these batteries, there are only a certain limit to how much energy they could store, so there would be times when there are still excess power from solar.

ARK is saying this excess power could be used for Bitcoin mining. When there is an incentive such as Bitcoin, this could encourage people from households to adopt renewable solar energy. Compare this to your Visa/Mastercard payment processing centre which is likely using power from some coal-fired power station somewhere in your country.