Crypto mining company loses bid to force B.C. Hydro to provide power

I don't think we really need to question the meaning of "clean energy". I think we're all aware that it costs something to the environment, after all solar panels and batteries don't grow on trees.

> I don’t think there’s such a thing as any truly clean energy.

Your use of "clean" here seems like a strawman.

Some forms of energy exploited by humans (i.e. fossil fuels) impose far greater environmental costs than others (i.e. wind/solar). Lumping them all together because nothing manufactured at scale is "clean" is ignoring the vast differences between them.

That's why anymore, the terms "renewable" and "zero-carbon" are used to describe future energy sources, not "clean".

> And for what in the end? To support a fringe economic system of monetary transfer and speculation?

Those are the ones said out loud.

The unspoken end is to weaken and destroy the liberal institutions that are currently backed by the power of fiat currency, to then replace them with illiberal ones.

Climate change and the environment are not typically concerns for people who want that.

While I mostly agree, there are subtleties here. Due to transmission capacity inefficiencies there are places in the grid where generation exceeds available load and power pricing drops very low or runs negative in price. For example, there are areas in California where a combination of physics and politics causes generation to have nowhere to go. Under these conditions I dontnhave much issue with people mining bitcoin. If there were more productive loads that could be utilizing that power, they would be.

> Why not offer an agreement for off-peak use, and put profits into expanding capacity?

I think there is no such thing as off-peak in hydro power. It's a big water reservoir that you can open and close the tap at will.

When the reservoir runs low you can't just put in an order for a few km^3 to top up.

> provides an immediate customer for excess base power

It’s a reservoir. It doesn’t need anchor customers. To say nothing about the costs of being crypto affiliated to the company and region.

Bitcoin miners want to run as often as possible.in Texas they got paid when they don't run.

And this takes away any motivation to solve problems and invest in storage etc.

It would make more sense for the energy company itself to do this but never with some other company.

Nonetheless it's a myth that we constantly have so much unplanned overproduction.

Don't forget: Bitcoin market is disconnected with the energy market.

The bank would have to either find a way to make significant profits from that heavy computation or reduce the computation; CPU time is an operational cost and banks exist to make profits. Crypto mining is designed to be inefficient; it's a security feature, not a bug.

And if the global banking system was pulling 2% of global power consumption the shareholders would be fetching the pitchforks and torches. I have no numbers off the cuff but I don't see a world where banks would be dumping crypto levels of money into power and server use.

I worked for a large bank some years ago and while still using old IBM Mainframes which waste lot of energy they consume way less than those miners.

Different set of circumstances I believe and would likely be tackled differently.

I don't think there are currently many/if any Bank's that require a data center to draw as much power as required by the cryptocurrency miners.

Furthermore, does this Bank serve the people of that country? Does that Bank provide jobs for people in said Country? Does the benefit of such improvements in security greatly benefit the immediate customers in said country?

Many more questions would need to be asked to answer that question.

The article points out that these miners use a disproportionate amount of electricity, whilst providing little to no jobs to the local economy.

Whilst we don't have the numbers here, it is a safe bet for the company to withhold energy capacity for the likes of electric cars and heat pumps etc.

The bank would put the energy on the "expenses" side of its accounts and look for ways to reduce it, whereas cryptocurrency advocates seem to believe that the more waste the more secure it is.

(Arguably the use of AI for anti-fraud detection might start causing a bit of this problem)

Crypto would first need to catch up with all the features our banking system has like account recovery.

Besides that, the banking system is already optimized due to the capitalism behind it.

Btw. The crypto bros tell you that this doesn't matter because you should use lightning anyway (what an irony)

Price electricity using an exponential function so that people are incentivized to minimize usage. Use it for whatever you want.

I think you rightfully point out there is a spectrum. So far, the line is at: company that will add just a few jobs, will pull in profits all for themselves, and will take the electrical requirements of half a million people when that much energy is scarce.

Meanwhile, there is a trade-off. If the power were granted, that is half a million apartments worth of hydro power that is no longer available. Where will they get that power instead? Perhaps that can be supplanted by other renewables, but does speak to your point on diesel and other fossil fuels being used instead.

> If you’re payin, why is it not allowed?

Because they are not allowed to charge whatever they want.

No one would be able to mine profitably while using a diesel generator, so this isn't going to happen

Let's consider a large-scale mining operation that would use 20% (or up to 20% for elastic miners) of the current energy usage of a region. This isn't a hypothetical, this is something that's happened many times.

One of 3 things (or a combination of them) will happen:

A) The energy companies are now incentivized to produce more energy, which has an impact on the environment. Greenhouse emissions, resource extraction, waste, etc.

B) The mining operation may only use surplus energy in some situations. Or at least they claim to, though I'm skeptical of these claims. Regardless, this disincentivizes the energy company from producing energy in an elastic manner; they can now keep their production methods running a bit longer, and they'll get paid for this energy. See (A) for the problems with this. They may also have been incentivized to store surplus energy or peer with other companies whose energy demands would be complementary. They no longer have this incentive

C) More demand for energy results in higher prices for the other customers of the energy company.

I'm really glad BC hydro didn't accept the bid.

> I don’t agree that we need any more crypto mining operations, but at what point and whose control does the availability of electricity to a person get determined ?

Assuming we want a society where as many people as possible get their basic need covered while electricity supply is restricted, fixed (high) price on electricity for everyone just means that the richest will buy most of the supply for superfluous use while the poorest won't be able to afford heating.

Directly forbidding superfluous use should help against that. Though politicians may not be good at deciding what is superfluous (I can see resistive heating being deemed needed while gaming wouldn't, which is true but the game machine would heat as well as resistive heating leading to little difference in winter). Exponential price as another comment mentioned sounds like a better idea.