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Comment by jakupovic | Hacker News Reader

Because these applications are in middle of nowhere. You cannot store/transport the energy, the best you can do is burn it.

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I call BS. Look at this map of Canadian hydro power stations: https://hydro.canadiangeographic.ca/

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.

You do have to build very expensive transmission lines to transport that energy. In some places in the world it's simply not economically viable.

In some places there are volcanos. The "in some places" argument doesn't hold, when it's clearly very effective in many other ones.

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.

Yeah this a corner case not a proof. Putting a hydro plant of any size in a location that is, apparently (from what I understand based on comments here only) not connected to a regional grid or even local demand for baseload doesn't make sense. In a country that has unmet demand for water, electricity, and government services the last thing they ought to be doing is converting precious finite resources (to include construction labor opportunity cost) into speculative Bitcoin.

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.

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