Just a thought: You could also store the energy or use it to do actually useful calculations.
Well, why aren't you doing it?
Let me guess. You don't have enough money to waste to just build a "giant tesla coil .. to make some pretty arcs", just for the sake of it.
Let me guess further. If you actually were to build such a coil, you'd want a return on your investment, you'd want to make money. As do many (which is a huge understatement here) people who invest in some material stuff.
Some investments are simply not financially feasible, because not enough people are willing to pay enough money for the resulting product/service.
That's the reasons you're not building your tesla coil.
And it's also the reason why we don't see people stacking so many massive batteries at the GWh scale (and try to make profit), so that grid operators can put a check mark on that "balance the grid at all times" task.
It's not happening because it doesn't pay for itself.
"Store the energy" sounds easy but is everything but that.
So when Bitcoin miners come along and set up their gear in some grid where the price of electricity regularly goes low/negative .. which happens because noone else is able to use the amount of electricity available at that moment to do something useful with it .. then they're actually doing something useful.
They're preventing the price from going even lower, they're making the power generation more profitable.
If you can come up with some process to make use of the fluctuating excess electricity and at the same time, make money from it, congrats, you have an excellent business case and only need some investors to throw money at it to get filthy rich.
Until then, you could try to acknowledge that somehow through means of money/prices, (parts of) society has attributed some value to running sha256 perpetually, enough so that the process can use quite a bit of electricity and move money to electriticy producers.
Some of the largest stations by output are in northern Quebec (one of the most "middle of nowhere" regions in the world) and their power gets sold as far away as NYC.
Similarly for Chile and Argentina which have quite a few huge dams in Patagonia, which is also extremely remote.
Plus most of humanity lives within the same 100 mile range of water, esp. oceans, and the bulk of humanity live in areas with lots of sun.
Electricity acts like a medicine. What they ought to be doing is wiring transmission lines to the hydro plant to organic demand for power.
Now if the real purpose of the dam was flood control and water buffering, and the notional hydro gen facility is tertiary and irrelevant, OK fine. Mine your Bitcoin if they have all the electricity they need regionally already. But this is no proof of nothing for the crypto bros.
They run a small hydro power plant and needed a bench to manage the excess energy load. They instead went for bitcoin miner containers. It’s a net positive for them as:
- They can manage the load of the hydro power plant
- They can sell back the bitcoin and finance other activities in the park
- They use heat generated by miners to dry fruits and experiment with creating a small economy with excess fruit resources in the park.