> It just so happens that energy that otherwise would be wasted is the cheapest energy you can find. Utilizing that is unequivocally good.
Not necessarily, no. There's no free energy you can just plug into. If the energy is far-flung and remote, then you need to build infrastructure, to co-locate your miners, to build buildings, to build generators, to maintain and service these generators. If it's distributed enough, the lack of economy of scale offsets the fact that you're not paying anything for the power per se. This is self-evident in the fact these "free" energy sources aren't hooked up to the grid.
There's a real economy of scale associated with a big coal plant.
Hence: It is a fantasy that (b) ...co-locating miners there is more economical than throwing some coal onto the fire.
> It absolutely is not a "fantasy". It's called curtailment and it can be greater than 50% at certain times of day in certain areas.
That article's title alone moots your point. "More of a good thing – is surplus renewable electricity an opportunity for early decarbonisation?"
If you use it for mining, it's not going to be used for decarbonization is it?
The tendency is to treat this primarily as a technology problem for the power system to solve. Indeed part of the solution will lie in improvements in technology. We will need some form of energy storage to convert the excess at one time of day into necessary power system supply at another. Smart grids, especially smarter distribution systems, will be better able to manage increasing shares of renewables as well – and they too will likely have more energy storage. And finally, the growth of EVs (currently driving global battery demand) represents a huge potential source of storage and demand-side flexibility as well.
That is the solution, not hashing it away lol, which was my point.
Hence: It is a fantasy that (a) there's actually tons of energy floating around out there in the wild that can't be stored in some way or transported in some way. I said can't, not isn't, not shouldn't be.
You've in fact strengthened by point because there's enough there to lead to early decarbonization!