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Texas paid bitcoin miner more than $31 million to cut energy usage during heat wave
(www.cbsnews.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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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.
Also, $31 million could go towards better infrastructure that could allow this in the future.
Logic has no power here! —- said in Gandalf’s voice.
Wait, wasn't that wormtongue
We’re both wrong, it was Saruman.
You are advancing towards TolkienBoomer
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).
Site I worked at was on the company's smaller end and we consumed around 10MW an hour.
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)
Fixing the power grid works be socialism or something...
“Mah freedoms!”