M^O Labs co-founder and chief architect Greg Di Prisco discusses President Donald Trump’s upcoming crypto summit at the White House on ‘Varney & Co.’
President Donald Trump recently made a surprise announcement that the U.S. government would invest in a crypto reserve including Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, and Cardano. With the White House Crypto Summit on Friday set to embrace a pro-innovation regulatory framework, crypto looks set for a boom over the next four years.
Well… maybe.
While a White House Summit may help push currencies like Bitcoin further into the mainstream, the blockchain industry needs something more to really take off: energy — a lot more energy.
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A recent study revealed that Bitcoin — just a single cryptocurrency — consumes nearly 175 terawatt hours per year. To put that into perspective, it’s roughly the same amount of energy the nation of Ireland consumes in a year.
Whether it’s for your private wallet or a national reserve, transactions done on public blockchains, like Bitcoin, have to be mined. Mining is so energy intensive, any serious attempt at establishing a crypto reserve necessarily demands a strategy to exponentially increase energy consumption.
This acute need for energy is only exacerbated when one considers other administration goals and technological innovations all advancing concurrently. First, and most notably, is America’s united commitment to beating China in the race to develop artificial intelligence (AI).
Bitcoin Foundation Chairman Brock Pierce joins ‘Varney & Co.’ to discuss Trump’s ‘crypto strategic reserve’ plan.
America must lead in AI not only to fuel our economy and increase our productivity, but also to ensure this new technology is designed and deployed in line with our values, not those of Communist China.
But just like cryptocurrency, AI demands a large amount of energy. Last year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that data centers would double their energy usage by 2026, predominantly thanks to energy-intensive crypto mining and artificial intelligence (AI) computing. A peer-reviewed analysis found that NVIDIA alone would create enough servers by 2027 to consume 85.4 terawatt hours of electricity every year. Add to that the consumer transition to electric vehicles and President Trump’s plan to reshore manufacturing, and our energy needs are about to skyrocket.
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Energy efficiency efforts can help offset some of these needs, but they won’t be enough. Regardless, America will need more energy — and fast.
President Trump often boils down his energy strategy to “drill, baby, drill.” But as his right-hand man Elon Musk discovered a few years ago, oil and gas aren’t a silver bullet. Back in 2021, Musk announced that Tesla would begin accepting Bitcoin as a form of payment. Within months, Musk changed course, citing the large amount of fossil fuels used for Bitcoin mining. “Cryptocurrency is a good idea,” Musk said at the time, “but this cannot come at great cost to the environment.”
Elon Musk at Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday, March 4. (Getty / Getty Images)
For cryptocurrency and AI to work, America must produce more energy cheaper and cleaner. We need a truly all-of-the-above strategy, which means taking any energy source we can get below or above ground and using it.
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So yes, let’s “drill, baby, drill.” But we should drill for natural gas as well as geothermal energy, which is reliable and carbon-free power.
The Trump administration should also embrace policies like the 25C and 25D tax credits, which support residential home clean energy upgrades with everything from heat pumps to solar panels. The less energy consumers use and the more they generate from their own homes, the more energy we will have left over for other needs, like data centers.
Likewise, technologies such as hydrogen, solar, wind, and nuclear have to be on the table. Last year it was announced that the Three Mile Island nuclear facility would be brought back online by 2028.
The Three Mile Island Nuclear Plant is seen in the early morning hours in March 2011. (Jeff Fusco/Getty Images / Getty Images)
This news is welcome. We should refurbish and restart as many nuclear reactors as possible while exploring other technologies like small modular reactors (SMRs) that can add large amounts of clean electricity to the grid.
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Ideally, over time, America can begin moving from high-carbon energy sources to cleaner or even zero-carbon energy, all while keeping production as high as it needs to be to fuel innovation.
The White House Crypto Summit will have a lot to cover, from discussing what guardrails should be established around a cryptocurrency reserve to how much the government should invest in each coin. But above all, policymakers must remember that these plans will only work if America commits to an all-of-the-above energy strategy.
Chet Love is the Managing Partner of Cornerstone Group International and Chairman of the Board of the Joseph Rainey Center for Public Policy. He also served as Director of Policy and Legal Counsel for SolarCity (now Tesla).
