I don't buy the argument in the article. The purpose of a battery is to store energy to be used later and potentially elsewhere. There is no way to regain the energy that was turned into heat while mining bitcoins, so bitcoin is not a battery. The comparison with aluminum production is also quite weak, since aluminum has an intrinsic economic value, whereas cryptocurrencies don't. Most of the arguments given in the a…
It's not because you'll need it later. It's because you can sell it later.
If there's no way to monetize excess energy (because we lack storage), people won't invest into making excess energy. And since renewables produce a lot of excess energy it makes them less desirable than they should be.
Analogy to broken window fallacy is totally warranted. But please notice that what broken windows do is extend capacity of glaziers. And if windows are broken cyclically then at times when there's not much demand for window repair additional glazier capacity will be used in other ways like for building glass skyscrapers (I'm stretching analogy, I know).
Renewable energy is not a scarce resource, so it's unlike the glass from the fallacy. And work put into creating too much renewable energy is work well spent given horrible state of our power network and our over-reliance on polluting energy generation methods.
The fallacy in broken windows fallacy is that additional money earned by glazier will somehow benefit the economy, and that's not the case. What might possibly benefit the economy would be oversupply of glaziers, which could make some very beneficial enterprises economical.
It's like with education. We know education is of a huge value to society. But we don't have in the economy a good way to funnel more money into education, especially to the places where it's most needed.
If you figure out a way of pouring money into training new teachers and paying them, so you have oversupply of teachers on the surface of it you are wasting resources, but additional teacher capacity even if it's often underutilized or used to 'spin the wheels' will benefit society.
Economy is prone to getting stuck into local optima and sometimes you need countereconomical nudge to get out of it to be free to travel to better optimum. I hope crypto can be such nudge for renewable energy production by sort of filling the gap of lacking storage capacity technologies.