It is the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority's director general Erik Thedeen and the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency's director general Björn Risinger who are fighting and demanding a ban on the energy - consuming server halls - for the sake of the environment.
Requires EU ban
"Our opportunities to meet the Paris Agreement are threatened by energy-consuming production of cryptocurrencies. The EU should ban extraction and Sweden should take the lead for the sake of the climate by counteracting new establishments in Norrland," the two directors general write.
According to them, electricity consumption for the extraction of Bitcoin increased by several hundred percent between April and August this year.
Energy consumption now amounts to one terawatt hour and this corresponds to household electricity for 200,000 households.
Serverhall runs a greenhouse
But Boden's municipal councilor Claes Nordmark (S) believes that the server halls are needed and that Boden and other municipalities in Norrland benefit from that development.
- There is a lot of development in having computer server halls with us and we want to be part of running that.
This is important for Boden because it creates green and sustainable jobs.
Among other things, we work with energy efficiency improvements of data server halls and we have also set up a greenhouse that will be operated on residual heat from a data server hall, says Claes Nordmark.