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Comment by bobcostas55 | Hacker News Reader

Energy is not fungible. Just because you have electricity in place A doesn't mean you can get it to place B in a cost-effective way, so mining next to, say, a hydro station with spare capacity (where electricity is cheap) doesn't necessarily have any impact at all elsewhere.

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Specific example:

Coinmint in upstate new york is located in an old Alcoa aluminum smelter plant that has long shut down. It gets power from Moses Saunders dam a few miles away. The factory was originally placed near the dam so that it could provide massive amounts of power to keep the pot lines hot 24/7.

The whole place is super remote. I've seen the costs for carrying hundreds of MW just a few miles and they are massive at this scale. You can't just economically build more lines to send the power elsewhere.

Short of firing up the superfund site again and smelting aluminum, a bitcoin mine is literally the most profitable thing you could use this power for. The dam needs maintenance and a constant draw of power to keep it operational, and this pays for it.

Since the power lines are direct from the dam to the plant and the contracts were all drawn up decades ago, this has zero impact on the local community prices. Never mind that the local community doesn't draw anywhere near enough power compared with what the dam produces.

The crypto miners who set up shop in Northern NY to take advantage of cheap hydro and wind power caused electricity prices to spike for local residents, resulting in municipalities leveraging new taxes on the companies or issuing outright bans. This article is from 2018:

Plattsburgh went over its power allotment and was forced to purchase electricity on the open market for far higher prices. This cost was distributed among the city’s residents, some of whom ended up paying between $100 and $200 more for their electricity than usual.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xk4qv/bitcoin-ban-plattsbur...

Massena (near the Alcoa facility) this year issued a moratorium so the city could draw up new regulations:

“The moratorium is a pretty straightforward procedure. The language is relatively clear. The idea is that we place a moratorium on any further cryptocurrency mining development while we get some regulations in place that will govern those types of facilities. The planning board had indicated, and I agreed that the code lacked any real regulatory scheme for these types of facilities within the town,” Mr. Gustafson said.

https://www.nny360.com/communitynews/business/town-of-massen...

https://www.northcountrynow.com/letters/snake-oil-alert-bloc...

You picked off the easily googled articles that are unrelated to Coinmint and happened during the crypto boom in 2017 / 2018, when people were renting warehouses and filling them with miners. Everyone got rightfully pissed.

The article about the moratorium is from the summer, and if you are looking for the Coinmint angle, here you go (dated July 23, 2021):

https://www.northcountrynow.com/news/massena-town-board-plan...

You are just googling articles and not even reading them. Coinmint is mentioned in there, but there is no 'angle' in that article other than the mention. They are still in operation today and expanding and I doubt that is going to change any time soon.

Ya would have to agree. That far upstate NY, it's a different game.

The other aspect to consider, which is being dropped, is Coinmint operates with support from NYS via Empire State Development, so there's that.

There's on the order of 7+ million people within 150km of the dam. I don't think I would call that remote.

Not to mention that all New York power plants, including Moses Saunders, are connected to a massive electrical highway that runs straight to New York City.

The lines from Moses Saunders to the plant are direct. You can even see them on google maps if you zoom in and follow them.

You can't just suddenly push more power through the same lines.

The Moses Saunders dam is connected to the NYISO transmission network. The power system in New York is designed to move power north to south, west to east (lines tend to be symmetric in theory but a good model is that the city is the load). You can look at a price map of New York State and see that. Power from the dam can go from it to anywhere else in New York (or the eastern interconnect) at the cost of transmission losses and tolling. Drawing power directly from a hydro plant doesn’t make that power green because, insofar as the plant could supply electricity to the rest of the grid, it means your power usage has the same environmental impact as the average unit of electricity on the grid at that time. The only thing it does is reduce your cost.

The amount of load that is allocated to the Alcoa facility has been negotiated and fixed into contracts and capex has been spent to build out the infrastructure for that. It isn't like you can just flip a switch and direct the power to the NYISO.

> at the cost of transmission losses and tolling

... a key point that I feel you're glossing over.

Yes you can flip a switch and direct the power elsewhere, that is what switching yards do. The plant might have a supply contract with Alcoa but if Alcoa doesn’t use the supply they contracted for you they don’t have to throw the power away. Usually those agreements have take or pay provisions which require the buyer to pay regardless of whether they take the power. If they don’t take the power the generator is free to sell it on.

Transmission losses are not nothing but they are not huge. Maybe 2% to New York (it isn’t they far). Maybe 5% total if you include distribution.

Edit: Follow the lines out of the plant, at 44.978432, -74.797925 they split.

This does make me wonder how difficult it is to raise the voltage on the same lines by changing transformers.

You might need to separate the lines more (and need bigger insulators), but I wonder how much of this gets overbuilt at the point of construction so you can upgrade to run more energy over the same wires without replacing them.

Anyone know?

The NYPA is in the process of upgrading the Massena-Adirondack transmission lines which will initially be at 230kV, but later be able to be run at 345kV.

https://www.nny360.com/news/stlawrencecounty/power-authority...

Lol your 150km loop captures Ottawa, Montreal and Kingston in Canada and Watertown/Plattsburgh NY.

All of these are about as apples to oranges in relation to geographic ties to Massena as you can get.

Between Massena and those places is a whole lot of nothing for a couple hours.

That's like saying there is some meaningful geographic tie between Bethlehem, PA and NYC (133km), or that "Unity House, PA" is not remote because it's 143km away from NYC and its 8.4mil residents.

Perhaps Massena is geographically remote and isolated then, but it is certainly not when it comes to the electrical system, which is what is being discussed here. There is plenty of existing transmission capacity to export hydroelectric power from Massena even without Alcoa and Coinmint.

Do you know how much to costs, per km, to run and maintain those lines?

You seemed to be asserting that without a major user near the dam, they would need to build more transmission lines or otherwise waste the generating capacity available.

This seemed unlikely to me, as transmission grids are built with significant redundancy, especially for the high-voltage networks. For example, the transmission capacity for the 8 500kV circuits from Bruce Nuclear (ignoring 3 230kV circuits) is 1.5 times the generating capacity. I wasn't sure about this particular station, but with a bit of digging, it seems like the Massena-Adirondack lines alone (there are several others) can carry 900MW, which is more than the capacity of the power station. So no additional lines should be needed.

I can't be that much since we've had long distance high voltage transmission lines for decades, even in relatively poor countries.

Plus, if you really wanted to because there was no other use, you could, you know, shut down the hydro power plant and return the land to nature. Hydro power plants still have an environmental impact, no point in running them for what is practically, speculation.

In the US, the people who pay for those lines are the consumers and it isn't cheap to run. This translates to more expensive power bills.

Shutting down the dam isn't going to happen. It is split by Canada and the US and does more than just power Coinmint.

The lines are cheap enough to run. About 1-2% of the electricity cost in the UK.

It's not that simple because these imbalances won't last forever. If the cost of renewable power remains low, it will encourage people in those regions to buy EVs, electrify their homes and businesses, relocate industrial usage to that area, etc.

If crypto-miners jump in to soak up that excess capacity, that cycle doesn't happen and there's very little positive outcome to show compared to all of those uses. 50 years from now, people are going to wish electrifying normal life had happened quickly but they're not going to be using a blockchain or glad that some speculators were able to make large returns for a few years.

People don't build hydroelectric plants in, say, northern Quebec and suddenly discover that there's all this free energy and no one around to use it. The build those hydroelectric plants and the transmission lines to places (say, Montreal) where people need that energy, even if those lines are 1000s of km long.

The electricity may be cheaper next to that hydro station because you're not also paying for the 1000km transmission line. But your use of that electricity would preclude the people 1000km away from using it.

What an odd take, given that electricity is almost the poster definition of fungible. Sure there are transmission losses, but they are very minor.

It's not perfectly fungible, but nothing in the real world is, everything has some sort of shipping costs. I can't think of anything more fungible than electricity except for virtual items like dollars.

I disagree, the hydro stations that we have in place were in fact meant to transport electricity from place A (a mountain area, in most of the cases) to place B (where people actually live) in cost-effective ways, that was their purpose from the very beginning. Using that energy up increases the price people from place B have to pay.

You could say that one could build a new hydro station just for delivering energy to crypto miners but that would open another can of worms as we're slowly starting to realise that hydro stations are not the most environment-friendly things imaginable (especially when it comes to habitat loss and disruption).

What you must also mention is that electricity is a finite resource. Consuming electrical energy - even at a hydro power station - means the energy you used isn't delivered to somewhere else.

is electricity finite? i don't think so.

you might say that the grid can only support a certain load at a some given time, but obviously more energy could be provided.

in any case, i think it's silly to concern ourselves with (specifically Bitcoin's) energy consumption, as it's tiny compared to the efficiency gains that are realized elsewhere as a result of bitcoin's adoption.

Yes, electricity is finite. Just because you could add more power generation doesn’t mean it’s infinite, c’mon now.

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