Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts
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Re: Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts
#2Good stuff. A 1% savings, but that's does help people's ACs stay on. Texas really should start bumping up their capacity though. It's only going to get hotter.
Re: Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts
#3Good stuff. A 1% savings, but that's does help people's ACs stay on. Texas really should start bumping up their capacity though. It's only going to get hotter.
In theory, bitcoin mining can help make increasing capacity more economically viable, by buying all excess energy and switching off during load peaks. It all depends on bitcoin contiuing to maintain its value as an asset, though.
Re: Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts
#4Good stuff. A 1% savings, but that's does help people's ACs stay on. Texas really should start bumping up their capacity though. It's only going to get hotter.
It's over 1%. The peak grid demand according to the article was 78,206 megawatts, and the miners powered down "over 1000 megawatts", so at minimum it was 1.28% savings, potentially higher assuming the grid isn't running at that peak demand mentioned.
I suppose it's good news, but also it's a bit ridiculous that 1-2% (or more) of the entire State of Texas' summer energy usage is being wasted on mining cryptocurrency.
Re: Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts
#5Good stuff. A 1% savings, but that's does help people's ACs stay on. Texas really should start bumping up their capacity though. It's only going to get hotter.
In theory, bitcoin mining can help make increasing capacity more economically viable, by buying all excess energy and switching off during load peaks. It all depends on bitcoin contiuing to maintain its value as an asset, though.
Nope that's just bullshit.
If you would price in co2 creation for no real value you would see that for society (most of us like 99,99999%) it's a net negative.
It also derails investment which would make more sense as the Bitcoin market is decoupled from the normal market.
The local smelter or papermill or any other energy intense industry has to play by totally other rules that Bitcoin.
The fact that they claim that they should down their miners is also not even proven and should make it very unrealistic.
Miners loose tremendous amount of money while not running. They can't afford to just not run for a long period.
And I have seen mining rigs in Texas who uses ac to cool down their shit.
They consume even more.
We start to be smart and accept that energy needs to be used for things helping people not gamblers.
Re: Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts
#6Good stuff. A 1% savings, but that's does help people's ACs stay on. Texas really should start bumping up their capacity though. It's only going to get hotter.
There is ~100GW of solar generation in ERCOT's interconnect queue.
https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/rampant-solar...
> As of 30 September [2021] developers had 100.3GW of solar capacity in the queue, 42.4GW of utility-scale battery storage, 22.5GW of wind, 13.5GW of natural gas and minor amounts of other technologies such as biomass.
Re: Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory, bitcoin mining can help make increasing capacity more economically viable, by buying all excess energy and switching off during load peaks. It all depends on bitcoin contiuing to maintain its value as an asset, though.
Nope that's just bullshit. If you would price in co2 creation for no real value you would see that for society (most of us like 99,99999%) it's a net negative. It also derails investment which would make more sense as the Bitcoin market is decoupled from the normal market. The local smelter or papermill or any other energy intense industry has to play by totally other rules that Bitcoin. The fact that they claim that…
I think all large scale texas miners use some sort of active cooling (immersion, A/C, etc.). They use a lot of power.
Re: Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts
#8Good stuff. A 1% savings, but that's does help people's ACs stay on. Texas really should start bumping up their capacity though. It's only going to get hotter.
In theory, bitcoin mining can help make increasing capacity more economically viable, by buying all excess energy and switching off during load peaks. It all depends on bitcoin contiuing to maintain its value as an asset, though.
This is a broken window fallacy.
Re: Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts
#9This is nothing special - at current bitcoin prices, I don't see how a miner could be profitable with electricity above $100/MWh. They're shutting down (for peak hours) because it's not economic to keep running. The regulator asking for conservation is just window dressing.
Re: Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory, bitcoin mining can help make increasing capacity more economically viable, by buying all excess energy and switching off during load peaks. It all depends on bitcoin contiuing to maintain its value as an asset, though.
Nope that's just bullshit. If you would price in co2 creation for no real value you would see that for society (most of us like 99,99999%) it's a net negative. It also derails investment which would make more sense as the Bitcoin market is decoupled from the normal market. The local smelter or papermill or any other energy intense industry has to play by totally other rules that Bitcoin. The fact that they claim that…
Yes, but Texas does not tax carbon, and if they want to trade off a decrease in efficiency for a increase in resilience, they can. I'm not really sure if people understand this, but preparing and stockpiling in general is highly inefficient, for example turning over smallpox vaccine stocks in the SNS does not come cheap.