Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

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"their mostly-non-renewable power generation"

Actually, most crypto mines in China are located in Sichuan or Yunnan, precisely because of an oversupply of hydroelectricity. More than a quarter of the world's hydropower is generated in China (350 GW) and most of that is from Sichuan & Yunnan. 350 GW is more hydropower generated than the next three biggest hydro producers combined (US + Brazil + Canada.)

Because of the demand-supply imbalance in Sichuan an Yunnan, kWh prices are cheap, hence mining is profitable. ~90% of the electricity in these regions is generated from hydropower.

The oversupply is a result of inadequate grid infrastructure preventing the transport of electricity to resell it to neighboring regions, and a slowdown of China's economic growth.

Sources:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2018.01.090 — Hydropower curtailment in Yunnan Province, southwestern China: Constraint analysis and suggestions — "The increasing curtailment of hydropower generation not only caused large-scale waste of sustainable energy [...]" In 2016 alone, Yunnan was forced to waste 15% or 31.4 terawatt-hours of hydroelectricity.

https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/chinese-... ("In 2016, for instance, overcapacity from hydropower stations in Sichuan and Yunnan amounted to a whopping 45.6 terawatt hours")

It's so bad that China is now restricting the constructions of dams in Sichuan an Yunnan to not exacerbate the overcapacity problem.

Then why did they even build it there? You know what the demand is going to be in the near future and you know what capacity you're designing for. Was this built purely for mining? Because if so, the money used to build this could have been used elsewhere.

People often bring this up when talking about bitcoin mining but it makes no sense to me. How can this be true (and the whole truth)? It sounds like the kind of argument that bitcoin supporters would spread happily. Which I used to be, by the way. I GPU mined back when it was all fun and games. I used to also doubt the claims that bitcoin uses the power of a small country. I assumed some journalist looked at the difficulty, derived the number of hashes that need be done, looked at an average computer in their office, and voila. But then I did the math, taking the hash rate and figuring in the most optimal case, using only the most efficient miners, and to my surprise it's true. A small country of power just being wasted. I'm all for proof of stake networks, but bitcoin just has to die, the sooner the better.

It's similar to new offices being built when there is enough empty office space in the city already.

If the government incentivises construction there will be big infrastructure projects. The government might not need the actual project and its output but rather the construction itself for fueling employment and economic growth.

They built it there because the river was there... you don’t choose where is hydropower. That the damm was built before the adequate power grid is operational will be totally irrelevant in a few years. Maybe they seize the opportunity to mine crypto in the meantime as a very profitable joke against crypto-investors...

That's where China has water.

In addition, China has also been trying to shove people to the interior provinces as a policy for quite a while now.

Alright, but then why not build data centers there? There's other things that are not there because the power is not that cheap anymore (since there is demand by miners).

Even if it's true that they built capacity for nothing, no way that the power is just up for the grabs at almost no cost. There are always other purposes for surplus power.

> Then why did they even build it there?

Because China. The country is/was flooded with cheap capital and the result is infrastructure projects everywhere. Some make sense, some not so much.

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