To ease load on aging grid, state program offers energy credits to bitcoin miners to curtail their power consumption.

  • exohuman@programming.dev
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    1 year ago

    Honestly, why allow them to mine on the grid at all until it is upgraded? It’s just a big wasteful use of energy that uses public resources but doesn’t benefit the public at all. It just prints money for the guys doing it.

      • WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Sure, but I don’t know how much that would matter. In the short-term, batteries might be a viable solution, but $31million would get you about a ~15MW storage system from my understanding, which is about 1 order of magnitude too small to be more than a rounding error and 2 orders of magnitude off from being a fix. Also, electric companies profit off of cryptominers (which theoretically could be used to improve the grid) and ERCOT sees them as a flexible demand that can be turned off in emergencies (at the cost of money).

          • WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            That’s 15MW for 4 hours. Typical period of tight conditions is probably more like 1 hour, so 4 hour capacity is overkill for what Texas has been going though this summer). You could get more capacity for a 2 hour period. I think Texas peak power demand was about 100GW (I think that excludes some parts of Texas that aren’t part of the Texas grid at the East and West ends)

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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      1 year ago

      Because they are buying the power, which pays for grid upgrades. The grid won’t be improved without demand, and miners provide a flexible, profitable demand for power.

      ERCOT’s incentives are a bit off, though. They should be offering power to miners at very low rates when they have excess supply available, then jacking up the rates to miners well beyond the point of profitability when they don’t have it. Ideally, they would convince the miners to install their own solar and wind generation (and maybe pumped storage as well) and pay them more than they would earn mining to backfeed the grid during power shortages.

      Paying miners not to use power is just fucking stupid.

      • jonne@infosec.pub
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        1 year ago

        It probably falls under a general policy where they compensate big industrial users if they shut down to save the grid, think like a factory shutting down for the day. It would make sense in those instances, but for crypto mining it’s just wasteful.

        • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          That makes sense, but if that’s the case, ERCOT needs to adjust its rates for that plan. They need to increase the cost of power and decrease the reward for discontinuing their use.

          Miners should be pushed toward a plan with highly variable power costs. They should have the very lowest rates when power is plentiful, but the highest rates when it is scarce. They are ideal candidates for this kind of “demand shaping”.

          • jonne@infosec.pub
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            1 year ago

            Yeah, a compensation plan should basically compensate a user for their fixed costs involved in shutting down (wages, etc), and not things like opportunity cost (the products you would’ve otherwise been able to produce and sell).

            Thing is, you can’t tailor different rates per customer, so a crypto miner is probably always going to be ahead, because they basically have no running costs besides electricity. The only other cost is basically the cost of acquiring the ASICs and having a security guard on site.

            • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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              1 year ago

              You certainly can establish different rate plans for your customers to choose from. You don’t need a fixed cost per kWh. You could offer discounts for off-peak consumption, and surcharges for on-peak. You could establish reliability tiers, where you get a discount in exchange for being ready to shut down consumption when needed. The lower the tier you select, the cheaper your power, but the more you have to shut down.

      • Bobert@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Was in the thread yesterday saying the same thing. What you describe is exactly what TVA does in essence.

        Ideally, they would convince the miners to install their own solar and wind generation (and maybe pumped storage as well)

        Texas has a ‘problem’ that prevents them from being able to incentivize this well. At least from what I overheard during my stint at a mine. Texas’s big draw are all of the abandoned oil wells. You can simply go purchase a plot of land with a capped well, uncap it and install a Natural Gas generator that captures and burns the NG often released when drilling for oil. This gives you a one time fee for the generator costs and then after that you are in the clear with ‘free’ (relatively, minus initial costs) energy. This isn’t exclusive to Texas, but obviously it can be done at a higher rate in the state compared to others.

      • exohuman@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Agreed. This is a good solution for the wasteful energy usage of the miners. I don’t see how they arrived at paying them not to use the grid. Does literally any private citizen get paid not to use large amounts of electricity?

        • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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          1 year ago

          Certain large industrial customers might get paid to voluntarily shed loads as part of a service level agreement, but those agreements should include rates structured to make mining unprofitable.

    • hddsx@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Because it’s Texas land of the free.

      Individuals can do whatever they want and the costs are set appropriately. Mining bitcoin is more profitable than the cost of electricity. They can either jack the prices up for everyone, or pay miners not to mine. It’s cheaper to pay.

      Is it cheaper to ban mining or improve infrastructure? Sure, but there is no societal good, only individual. Banning mining would be an “infringement on the right to make money”.

      Texas.

        • hddsx@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Yeah, well. A lot of Texans have a strong belief in who qualifies as an individual, and who may as well be property.

    • yata@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Honestly, why allow them to mine on the grid at all until it is upgraded?

      There is absolutely no reason why anyone should be allowed to waste energy on that pyramid scheme shit in the first place.

      • havokdj@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Bitcoin is not a pyramid scheme because nobody controls bitcoin.

        FIAT is closer to a pyramid scheme than bitcoin. Do I like bitcoin? No, I prefer monero when it comes to crypto transactions because it actually serves a purpose, but it is the truth.

        • hddsx@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          It basically is. Crypto itself has no inherit worth. You don’t actually own anything. It is purely speculative. If the value of crypto collapses today, there is nobody who will ever recoup any value.

          Let’s contrast that with the stock market. Are a lot of people screwed as well? Yes. But the business has physical assets that can be sold or auctioned off to recoup something

      • Caveman@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Capitalism. Socialism would allocate energy and eliminate BTC mining. Social Democrats would give people energy allowance for home use and increase the price by taking it. Pure capitalists say it’s good.

      • JokeDeity@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        All your downvotes are for using the words pyramid scheme. It’s a lot of not great things, for sure, but it’s not a pyramid scheme.

        • triplenadir@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          all of your downvotes - many more than the person you’re replying to - are for trying to claim that a system that’s functioned as a pyramid scheme for most of its existence is not a pyramid scheme.

          how much cryptocurrency do you have?

          • havokdj@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Care to explain how BTC, a currency with no one controlling it, is a pyramid scheme?

            Who benefits from it besides huge miners? All they get is transaction fees paid to them for supporting the network. That’s not a pyramid scheme.

    • xkforce@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Because its Texas: the state run by idiots that refuse to connect to the rest of the american grid because if they did, theyd have to actually get everything to code eventually.

      • WalrusDragonOnABike@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        They also built much of the solar in one region instead of diversifying. So even when other places are under fire-weather watch from high winds, we can have low wind energy because of low winds where they’re built…

    • Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      In theory: if you are charging at proper (optimally tiered) rates and have the capacity to support it, there is no problem allowing people to run a mining farm. In fact, this is why most crypto mining farms aren’t actually economically viable and a lot of it is based off of finding rentals with “included” power bills and the like.

      But this is texas so gotta lower prices on your half busted grid to encourage people to move in and destroy the environment.

    • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Because normally they make a small profit on the miners. They just didn’t expect prices to shoot up.

      I am sure they will change their contracts to have contingency clauses for the future.