Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts | Hacker News Reader

Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts

decrypt.co

23 pointsbelltaco16 comments

Good stuff. A 1% savings, but that's does help people's ACs stay on. Texas really should start bumping up their capacity though. It's only going to get hotter.

In theory, bitcoin mining can help make increasing capacity more economically viable, by buying all excess energy and switching off during load peaks. It all depends on bitcoin contiuing to maintain its value as an asset, though.

Nope that's just bullshit.

If you would price in co2 creation for no real value you would see that for society (most of us like 99,99999%) it's a net negative.

It also derails investment which would make more sense as the Bitcoin market is decoupled from the normal market.

The local smelter or papermill or any other energy intense industry has to play by totally other rules that Bitcoin.

The fact that they claim that they should down their miners is also not even proven and should make it very unrealistic.

Miners loose tremendous amount of money while not running. They can't afford to just not run for a long period.

And I have seen mining rigs in Texas who uses ac to cool down their shit.

They consume even more.

We start to be smart and accept that energy needs to be used for things helping people not gamblers.

I think all large scale texas miners use some sort of active cooling (immersion, A/C, etc.). They use a lot of power.

Yes, but Texas does not tax carbon, and if they want to trade off a decrease in efficiency for a increase in resilience, they can. I'm not really sure if people understand this, but preparing and stockpiling in general is highly inefficient, for example turning over smallpox vaccine stocks in the SNS does not come cheap.

They don't need Bitcoin miners for this.

They can make deals with energy intense industries.

Or invest in energy storage or just be more creative about it than trying to appeal to miners.

This is a broken window fallacy.

It's over 1%. The peak grid demand according to the article was 78,206 megawatts, and the miners powered down "over 1000 megawatts", so at minimum it was 1.28% savings, potentially higher assuming the grid isn't running at that peak demand mentioned.

I suppose it's good news, but also it's a bit ridiculous that 1-2% (or more) of the entire State of Texas' summer energy usage is being wasted on mining cryptocurrency.

This is a common misconception. Bitcoin mining is taking electricity generation that would otherwise be wasted. In non-peak demand times the energy is generated anyway and would simply be wasted. Bitcoin mining takes that energy and does something productive with it.

The law of conservation of energy disagrees. Sure, a miner might not noticeably increase the load on a power plant. It may only require a teeny bit more gas to flow to the turbine. But it’s not free energy.

I'm not sure about Texas, but lots of regions end up selling or even giving away excess power overnight that's not utilized by the grid. Not all generators can be flipped on and off like a light switch. Nuclear is a prime example.

Now, if they're still running during peak periods, that's an issue and miners should pay through the nose for it. Treat them like aluminum smelters and force them to cozy up next to hydroelectric dams to siphon off electricity before it even hits the grid.

That's not how electricity works.

If you were talking about an energy grid 100% powered by wind and solar, and it was a sunny and windy day to the point of oversupply, that would be true. Even then you could direct the energy to batteries for non windy days so it's marginal.

Maybe if energy consumption was way lower than expected, the baseload generation like geothermal and nuclear might need to dump free power. That would be an event though not a normal condition.

Otherwise you are really, really wrong.

There is ~100GW of solar generation in ERCOT's interconnect queue.

https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/rampant-solar...

> As of 30 September [2021] developers had 100.3GW of solar capacity in the queue, 42.4GW of utility-scale battery storage, 22.5GW of wind, 13.5GW of natural gas and minor amounts of other technologies such as biomass.

This is nothing special - at current bitcoin prices, I don't see how a miner could be profitable with electricity above $100/MWh. They're shutting down (for peak hours) because it's not economic to keep running. The regulator asking for conservation is just window dressing.

Does >1% of all power used feel unreasonably high? I know people complain about Bitcoin power consumption, but I had no idea mining consumed power anyone on this sort of scale. Though, the Texas Blockchain Association may have an interest in overestimating the percentage of power ceded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com