At first glance, this makes zero sense, but once you dig in and read the details, it makes even less sense
pro tip, be born with a parent who runs a large power grid who can buy your debts
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Even if all you have is wind and solar, you can still turn it into baseload power by pumping water up behind dams, storing it in battery grids, or turning it into green hydrogen via electrolysis. Hell, you could even use it to heat up salts until they turn into a molten salt, which can be used for about 12 hours, going off of solar towers with molten salt generators…
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Makes sense to me, just sounds like the crypto company is holding the state’s power grid hostage
Who has the keys to free the hostage? ERCOT or the Crypto Mine?
Don’t blame the Crypto Mine for the decisions of the State or ERCOT.
TVA doesn’t give energy credits. They give you a thirty minute notice that your ¢/kwh is about to quadruple.
I don’t know about this specific case but it’s a common practice to have big consumers be on specific agreements with national grid so they can be shut off on demand to ensure the grid integrity. The companies are compensated for the inconvenience in exchange for their flexibility. Usually it’s with heavy industries like metal, paper and glass manufacturers.
My knowledge is specific to TVA, but I was privy to such an agreement that a Cryptominer I worked for had.
The Local Utility Provider would bill the company for their usage, but they did not provide the rate. TVA did because of the amount of electricity. This rate is much cheaper than the Utility Provider offers residential customers; economies of scale as well as the inability to store this amount of power meaning it’s “wasted” otherwise. Whenever there is a period of intense usage TVA would provide a 30 minute notice. After the 30 minutes were up the rate provided to us (industry) would more than quadruple, and was actually quite a bit above the residential rate. Residential customers are entirely exempt from this. Your rate, is your rate, is your rate.
The effect of the above meant that it was a mad scramble to shut everything offline whenever we got notice. Otherwise we were losing money. Regular industry trudged along because their bottom line doesn’t care if their power rate quadrupled for 3 hours a dozen days out of the year. It’s not that big a deal.
I definitely got to see the sausage being made, and it’s opened up my mind to some of the ignorance around crypto mining. If anything it drove me further away from being interested in it as anything more than a neat tech demonstration that people figured they could trade.
Yep. Architected a bunch of software to measure baselines, prove or disprove responses to demands within requested periods etc.
You don’t want giant arc furnaces running full tilt in the midst of an energy crunch. It’s enough compensation to cover NOT producing anything that day which the ratepayers pay for but also benefit from.
Everything had to work sub-second round-trip, fun stuff, egomaniacal boss.
People are still mining bitcoin? Lmao
People will always be mining. The cheaper the value, the less miners meaning more coins to sell. It won’t ever fully die.
Maybe if Texas shutdown those miners, their power grid wouldn’t be so strained all the time.
Those damn people, paying for electricity AND using it?!
Edit: Is this take so egregious its not worth even worth discussion? Just downvote and move along? The hive-mind opinions is one thing, but the lack of interest in actually engaging in discussion is really sad. But I guess it’d make sense for them to go hand in hand.
That’s like saying it’s fine for the Kardashians to use as much water as a whole city during a drought, because they pay for it.
All you did was make a satirical comment.
Shut down the big mines
