But with bitcoin mining your heat pays for itself, while if you use a heat pump you have to buy power to run the heat pump. So while heat pumps are more energy effient, bitcoin miners are far more economically efficient.
Having equipment sitting around unused is way more expensive than most people care to think about.
A heating coil might not be terribly valuable in July, but come November it will have roughly the same value it had the previous February. Bitcoin mining hardware that's switched off for five months is losing value at an alarming rate, and very quickly won't be a net reduction in costs.
Very quickly a heat pump becomes cheaper to operate, and cheaper to purchase. And if you amortize the cost over the life expectancy, that threshold is very, very low. People who have recent memory of living paycheck to paycheck are constantly screwed by the latter, and that Venn diagram overlaps heavily with several other circles that make crypto super attractive to some people and super ridiculous to others.
I went down this avenue of compute as radiator long ago, and I could never get the math to work, unless I moved somewhere that was cold most of the year, and that sure as fuck is not going to happen.
I recently replaced the 3 ton hvac unit on my small 1500 sq ft single family home with a heat pump and all the bids were in that range.
Also if you want to control every single room including bathrooms and walk in closets it gets tricky.
If they were going to heat using an electric space heater, it's a wash.
If they were going to heat using natural gas, but the electricity comes from nuclear, it's lower carbon.
If they were going to heat using natural gas, and the emissions are higher. BUT, if they were going to run the mining rig anyway, and they've merely turned off the gas heat, the emissions are overall lower.
Heat pumps work by moving heat, they usually move more heat than input energy.
Basically, a refrigerator is a heat pump. The input energy runs the heat pump, which it uses to move heat out of the refrigerator. Typically, for every watt of electricity, more than a watt of electricity is moved out of the refrigerator.
They work by compressing gasses into fluids, and then letting the fluid expand back into a gas. Basically, when a fluid evaporates, it absorbs heat as potential energy. The energy can be harvested by compressing the gas at a high enough pressure that it condenses into a fluid. Do this in a loop, and you can move heat.
No laws of physics violated!
Suppose you built a shed around the outdoor unit of a central air conditioning system and let it come up to max ambient temperature. Then right next to it you built a shed with a resistive heater which consumes the exact same wattage as the air conditioner. The first shed will be much warmer because you're not creating heat so much as you're moving heat. If you increase the resistive heater's wattage by about 2.5x then the sheds will be about the same temperature.
* Don't actually do this and expect the system to survive.
Unfortunately they care. For now only poor face real consequences of climate change. They are to poor to mitigate its effects.
No you don't, when permafrost melts it causes ground to move. It is really bad for everything build on or in it. Something like houses sinking and falling apart. In some cases it cause big holes in the ground and they got even bigger over time.
Commercial solutions have been in development for a few years. Here’s one example: https://www.wisemining.io/
Edit: after re-reading your comment I realize you also aren’t aware that miners can be throttled. Powering it down is not the only alternative to consuming 3kW.