Wind power, cryptocurrency in a combo that funds climate change research

An engineer and artist based in Berlin put together wind power and cryptocurrency mining to create a sustainable way to fund climate change research.

Critical Engineer Julian Oliver calls his latest project “Harvest.” He created a system which uses a 2-meter wind turbine to power a weatherproof computer that does nothing but mine cryptocurrency, particularly Zcash. It is then perpetually connected to the internet with a wireless 4G uplink.

According to Oliver’s site, the wind turbine puts out 700 watts of power at 24 volts. It has two 12-volt, 150 milliamp batteries connected in series. They weigh 43 kilograms each and are inside their own weatherproof cases.

The computer runs on an Intel i3 socket 1151 processor with an NVIDIA GTX 1080 ti graphics card to handle all the mining. It also has a 250 gigabyte solid-state drive, 4 gigabytes of DDR4 memory, and a 4G USB dongle for the internet connection.

Harvest was commissioned by the Konstmuseet i Skövde, an art museum in Skövde. An exhibition for the project was also launched on Sept. 14. It will run for two months in the museum.

Oliver stated that after the exhibit, the profit from the mined cryptocurrency will go to three non-profit climate change research and/or public awareness organizations. JB

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