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Comment by manquer | Hacker News Reader

> too expensive to transmit elsewhere

Citation needed .

It is rarely if ever too expensive to transmit electricity anywhere . We have offshore wind solar farms in remote places , there is even cross continent lines between Africa and Spain .

I am deeply skeptical it is too expensive for upstate NY to transmit power when there is probably 50 million people living in metro areas within say a 750 mile radius .

Every other dam is remote, every coal plant is remote they are all perfectly able to transmit to urban and industrial centers

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Look on a map. There is nothing (in the US) that is close to there that would consume the ~500MW of power the dam produces and sends to the plant.

The plant was shut down and nobody made an effort to direct the power elsewhere.

Transmission is insanely expensive at scale. I've seen their power bills and I talked to their head electrician who worked at the plant when it was operational. That's the best citation I can give you, sorry.

Have you looked on a map? The plant is right next to the largest power line between the USA and Canada, right between Ottawa and Montreal. A (presumably) new-ish wind farm is on the New York state side.

Have you read their website? "With 435MW of transformer capacity at its Massena complex" — that is the amount they can draw from the grid, not the generating capacity of any nearby power plant.

The plant is here: https://openinframap.org/#15.08/44.98237/-74.74862 (checked with several sources, e.g. https://www.gem.wiki/Massena_Complex).

I'm keenly aware of their operations as my last company looked into hosting in their facility and I know people who have hosted there too. I have also physically been there. Too bad HN doesn't allow photos, I've got some good ones.

The map shows what I'm talking about very clearly... all of the power is either used for the local Alcoa plants (there are several) or gets exported elsewhere.

There is little usage for that power locally (it is in the middle of nowhere, frozen in the winters and otherwise wasteland surrounded by superfund sites thanks to the smelting).

It also isn't like you can just plug in 115kv line into a 230kv line and call it a day. It would require new construction to send that power somewhere else, which is expensive and hard to justify over someone just paying for the power to stay right there.

I never said anything about 'generating capacity'. The dam, where I also went for a tour, is ~2k mw total, part goes to Canada and the rest to the US. The Massena facility has an allocation of that power.

There's no evidence at all that the power can't be transmitted elsewhere. There are high-capacity transmission lines in all directions. A ~600MW wind farm was connected to the grid right at the dam relatively recently.

I won't discuss this further.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

>I won't discuss this further.

>It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Little sneaky to put that last comment there, useless completely and spiteful? Just because your hypothesis turned out to be wrong doesn't mean you cannot admit it

I'll gladly admit spite towards people wrecking the climate for their own greed.

Cryptocurrency miners rank worse than oil and coal executives in my book.

(I've seen nothing to suggest my hypothesis is wrong.)

Well you may need the other commenter to give you a walking tour as you seem stuck in: "Bitcoin bad booo"

At least your bias is clear now.

This is the second time, you've misconstrued my statements and inserted your own dialog.

I didn't say it can't be transmitted elsewhere.

I said that it was expensive to do so and I've seen with my own two eyes the proof of that expense. The proof of that expense is that it hasn't been done yet, despite years of opportunities and the fact that it can be done (which I agree with you on).

For the record, my salary does not depend on this at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39293003

That's the third time you've missed. Your rage is blinding your thinking process, which is becoming quite entertaining.

As I said, I no longer mine anything and haven't since ETH went to PoS. Which, by the way, consumes very little power now.

HN citation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39411064

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