Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

ksut.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 302 posts

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#171

Post by anonporridge »

tw04 wrote: post #145
latchkey wrote: post #121

> US is incredibly slow in building transmission lines, takes decades. A lot of bitcoin miners use stranded power, which would otherwise go to waste. People often respond to me on HN that the power could be easily/cheaply sent elsewhere for better uses [0]. Comments like this just re-enforce the fact that these people have literally no idea what they are talking about. Thanks, I'll favorite this one. =) [0] https://n…

> A lot of bitcoin miners use stranded power, which would otherwise go to waste. A lot of bitcoin miners are keeping fossil fuel spewing power plants from being retired because the regulations that keep power affordable for Americans haven’t caught up. There’s a reason China killed bitcoin mining and the US needs to follow suit. Literally killing the planet for imaginary coins that don’t solve any problems that weren…

> There’s a reason China killed bitcoin mining and the US needs to follow suit.

According to this data, China tried, but failed to kill bitcoin mining. As of the last update in Jan 2022, China currently has 55% of the hashrate it had before the ban. https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/mining_map

Also, mining is a global industry. Banning it in one country is like grabbing a fist full of water. It just oozes out elsewhere. It looks like the China ban mostly oozed into the US and Kazakhstan, before rebounding back into China. The effective reduced total energy use from the China ban barely lasted 6 months before it surpassed previous levels.

This was the result of one of the strongest authoritarian surveillance states in the world. What makes you think anyone else can do better?

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#172

Post by lambda »

dralley wrote: post #148
lambda wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wind, hydro, and storage. Pumped hydro has already existed for a long time for helping nuclear with load following https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hyd... and as battery prices fall and production ramps up, even battery based storage is likely to become feasible for grid-scale storage.

Pumped hydro is very dependent on geography. Good luck doing pumped hydro in Kansas.

Sure. No solution is one size fits all. This particular solar installation happens to be in Colorado, very close to a lot of area where pumped hydro would be extremely cost effective.

Somewhere like Kansas, wind power and battery based storage may be more effective.

Here's a map of pumped storage hydro potential; note how dense the potential is throughout most of the Western US. https://maps.nrel.gov/psh

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#173

Post by anonporridge »

latchkey wrote: post #121

> US is incredibly slow in building transmission lines, takes decades. A lot of bitcoin miners use stranded power, which would otherwise go to waste. People often respond to me on HN that the power could be easily/cheaply sent elsewhere for better uses [0]. Comments like this just re-enforce the fact that these people have literally no idea what they are talking about. Thanks, I'll favorite this one. =) [0] https://n…

Bitcoin mining is a pioneer species, proving out the tapping of novel and remote energy sources and laying the initial infrastructure for more investment.

https://medium.com/the-bitcoin-times/bitcoin-is-a-pioneer-sp...

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#174

Post by tfourb »

Jgrubb wrote: post #135
KennyBlanken wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Promote electric vehicles, heat pumps, inductive cooktops, and other decarbonization that would increase electricity demand since you've got a plethora of electricity? Nope. Incentivize home energy storage and invest in grid level energy storage and encourage purchasing EVs that can be used as grid batteries? Nope. Invest in better grid-level interconnects to export electricity? Nope. Work with the community to attra…

I doubt they're morons, more likely perfectly intelligent and know exactly what they're doing and for whom.

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#175

Post by anonporridge »

thelastgallon wrote: post #53

I wonder if the tribes have enough autonomy to build transmission lines quickly. Just the Navajo Nation can build enough solar/wind and transmission lines within their reservation and probably connect to the grids in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona. US is incredibly slow in building transmission lines, takes decades. And, if they have enough autonomy to import Chinese panels (50% cheaper), a network of these n…

Related.

Even as energy production prices from solar trend towards zero, end user energy costs is still going to be lower bounded by transmission costs.

California in particular is getting a nasty taste of this, with many customer's bill being mostly transmission costs. However, this is largely because they're paying for PG&E's lawsuit payouts and regulatory required upgrades.

Energy can be free, but reliable and safe transmission will likely always be expensive.

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#176

Post by loeg »

samatman wrote: post #147
loeg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also for context, the quoted 756MW figure is about 68% of a single AP1000 reactor.

That's a serious overestimate. Figuring a 90% capacity factor for the reactor and 20% for the solar installation, it's 1005MW delivered power for the former and 151MW delivered for the latter. That's 15% of one reactor, or put another way, it would take about six and a half of these solar installations to provide the same power as one reactor.

My impression (trying to read charitably) was that the 756MW figure included some capacity factor, if an extremely optimistic one. (For the nuke, a reasonable capacity factor of 95% of 1100W is still more or less 1100W.) Of course you are correct if the stated figure is maximum output of the solar farm.

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#177

Post by latchkey »

anonporridge wrote: post #173
latchkey wrote: post #121

> US is incredibly slow in building transmission lines, takes decades. A lot of bitcoin miners use stranded power, which would otherwise go to waste. People often respond to me on HN that the power could be easily/cheaply sent elsewhere for better uses [0]. Comments like this just re-enforce the fact that these people have literally no idea what they are talking about. Thanks, I'll favorite this one. =) [0] https://n…

Bitcoin mining is a pioneer species, proving out the tapping of novel and remote energy sources and laying the initial infrastructure for more investment. https://medium.com/the-bitcoin-times/bitcoin-is-a-pioneer-sp...

As much as I appreciate articles like this, you're not going to win over the HN crowd with them. Especially now that Ethereum has been so successful with PoS and decimating power usage, not just on that chain, but all GPU based PoW chains.

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#178

Post by Tiktaalik »

EasyMark wrote: post #69
doodlebugging wrote: post #7

Sounds like a nice, sustainable economic boom for the Ute Tribe once they bring it online. Reading the slides from the biological/archaeological impact studies from Canigou Group shows that someone didn't proofread their slide. The burrowing owl study states that it is "Threatened with the State of Colorado but not Federally". It was probably supposed to say "Threatened within..." Good luck to the Utes. There is not…

> Sounds like a nice, sustainable economic boom for the Ute Tribe once they bring it online. As long as they properly distribute the profits to tribe members. There have definitely been some boondoggles in the past that only help the 1% ers

Seems to me like the 1%ers not handing down profits is a problem in Silicon Valley and beyond too...

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#179

Post by rainsford »

latchkey wrote: post #138
hannob wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of bitcoin miners use stranded power, which would otherwise go to waste. Often claimed, rarely supported by evidence or numbers. It's also unlikely to be very practical, because that'd essentially mean running bitcoin miners in load-balancing mode, and not running them most of the time. Given that bitcoin hardware tends to loose value quickly, as the next generation of mining hardware comes to the market, thi…

I have evidence and numbers. Update: I got downvoted for not posting them. I did in the link above though. https://www.coinmint.one/ is the data center. They have about 500MW of power going to them from the Moses-Saunders dam. They don't need to shut down cause it is hydro and 24/7. They actually help keep the dam running cause they balance the load coming from it. Just like the aluminum smelter before it did. The lo…

That's actually an interesting situation, but it doesn't support the assertion that the power would "otherwise go to waste" or that this is something a lot of bitcoin miners do. The argument that it's non-trivial to just transmit the power elsewhere is a persuasive one, the argument that bitcoin mining is somehow uniquely able to take advantage of that power is not as persuasive.

Even if the argument is that compute heavy data centers are the only use-case that makes sense, there's lots of compute use cases other than bitcoin. And obviously the former presence of the aluminum shelter suggests data centers are not the only good use-cases. I understand the appeal of the argument that bitcoin mining has less energy impact than people think because it can uniquely take advantage of weird edge cases, but it doesn't make sense to me.

Re: The Ute Tribe will construct one of the largest solar farms in the US

#180

Post by tfourb »

pixl97 wrote: post #162
tfourb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how it went in that specific case but yes, these type of impact studies are usually hands on, you go out into the field with a bunch of people and comb an area completely. In case of a chip factory currently developed by Intel in Germany, they went out onto the 200ha (roughly 280 football fields) and found and resettled 7 rare hamsters. 2 of those had to be dug out: https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/sachsen-anh…

I wonder how much identification of different floria could be done by hi-def drone capture of an area then image identification of different species could be done these days? I could see things like hamsters being more difficult as small mammals tend to hide to avoid being prey.

The problem as you say likely being that the drone shares properties with predatory birds that make hamsters scurry away ;-). Many endangered plants won't be visible from above due to other, larger plants and you'd need millimeter resolution or better.

I wouldn't underestimate how effective experienced and qualified humans can be in finding and interpreting signs of the presence of a small number of specific species in a large area. Drones and AI will probably get there at some point, but I doubt that its close.

Post reply on HN