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Comment by acdha | Hacker News Reader

There’s an interesting short term versus long term discussion: if a place has cheap electricity (hydro, geothermal, solar, etc.) for a while it becomes appealing for people to reconfigure around it — electrification for homes & vehicles, building heavy industry or cloud data centers, etc. If someone can deliver shipping containers full of cryptocurrency mining hardware, they can very quickly soak up that extra capacity, maybe even drive prices up a bit, and it has no benefit to the surrounding community other than perhaps a maintenance job.

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To make my point more concrete in terms of your example, the benefit would be something like:

Let's say Iceland has some natural advantage in fishing, because of the great fish around there. But, because our world violates the law of one price, it's instead of profitable to smelt aluminum there instead of fishing[2], and the world is deprived of the utility gain from the fish captured and shipped[1].

But then, once the world obeys "one energy price", the smelting doesn't make sense and they go back to fishing (while the imported crypto miners sop up the extra energy).

[1] hopefully with sustainable management

[2] They still fish there, today and in the hypothetical, but probably much less than the optimum.

Those seem fairly separate industries — I don't know how many power-plant operators would switch to fishing. The process I was thinking of would be more like this:

1. A major hydro / geothermal / solar / etc. project goes online providing n GW/day

2. Usage within the region where that power can viably be transmitted is 0.2n so there isn't pressure to elevate prices. Because the power supply is based on the local geography, there isn't a way to bring production closer to the consumers in distant areas (e.g. a solar farm is going to be more productive in Arizon even if you want to power a factory in Portland).

3. Ordinarily, someone who owns, say, an aluminum smelter might consider building a new one in that region to take advantage of the guaranteed green power rather than facing escalating prices based on competition and emissions controls take effect. However, if someone ships a bunch of cryptocurrency miners in to soak up any available power there won't be slack capacity and that's guaranteed to happen because they can ship containers of mining hardware in days whereas building an industrial facility takes years.

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