Bitcoin could support renewable energy development | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin could support renewable energy development

news.cornell.edu

A similar concept I like is bitcoin mining as a pioneer species.

The amount of infrastructure necessary to drop in a bitcoin mine with a satellite uplink in a very remote area that happens to have an untapped energy source is very small and finely scalable. This could be a valuable tool to prove out the economic viability of novel energy capture tech and/or locations without huge upfront costs. And the revenue flow itself justifies gradual expansion and scaling. Eventually other industries and people can be drawn into these burgeoning energy oases, further spurring growth.

More on that here. https://medium.com/the-bitcoin-times/bitcoin-is-a-pioneer-sp...

It's no coincidence that bitcoin mines sprout up anywhere that is saturated with cheap, renewable energy. Most often around hydro plants where the cheap power can be used that would have just been wasted anyway. These extra funds make renewable power much more economical.

No one wants to mine anywhere that energy costs more than 5c per kwh, and basically any populated area where demand is present the prices are going to be somewhere between 10-20c per kwh.

It already does in Africa. Bitcoin mining makes hydro plants profitable, and locals get power. Gridless does this.

Is our goal to increase renewable capacity, or decrease CO2 output?

Using new renewable capacity to offset new PoW obviously has no effect on existing emissions.

It does seem like a pretty cool thing that any excess electricity can be turned into money very trivially but I don't understand why this argument wouldn't also mean "Bitcoin could support coal energy development". Like, the technique described in the article of mining while a project is coming online would be true of every energy source right?

Mining is extremely reliant on basically zero cost energy given how efficient the network is. Something like coal only makes sense in corrupt countries like China where the bureaucracy is in place to make an unneeded coal plant, with no industry required for it. So the officials can mine Bitcoin and pocket the money. But in a real free market this is wildly unprofitable.

Numbers are spotty now for all sorts of reasons, but from the latest numbers I'm seeing, about 20% of bitcoins are still being mined in China (despite it being illegal) and 60% is being mined with renewables.

China is building out hydro plants way faster than they're building coal plants.

https://factsanddetails.com/china/cat13/sub85/item323.html

Theoretically, but I'd wager running a coal mine is many times more expensive than letting water or wind run through a turbine, so it may not be economical as the running costs of a mine would not get recovered.

Coal power almost anywhere is prohibitively expensive for the purposes of mining. Generally places that use coal are desperate for power so residents will pay 20c or so per kwh, which is way more than any miner would pay. Mining profits are razor thin already, so they need to go where they can get the cheapest power they can, which is usually right next door to hydro plants.

Right now the coal industry is being subsidized by US taxpayers, so maybe we could start by not doing that as much.

I was about to make a similar comment. One property of coal plants is that they can't ramp up or down very well with usage demands. I have a friend that operates at a coal plant where they installed miners to run during off hours when the demand is low, so rather than running at a loss during that period they more or less break even. It definitely would tip the balance for keeping that plant running for longer rather than replacing it with better alternatives.

When the grid can’t take more electricity, redirect to mining. It’s very obvious solution. What other type of activity can convert wasted electricity into money at a variable rate directly proportional to how much is available, with very fast turn on and shut down cycles?

Charging EVs; top-off charging for personal electronics (phones, laptops, etc.); queued k8s jobs; thermostats; water desalination; hydrogen production.

All of these already have mechanisms to take advantage of renewable output that would otherwise be curtailed. We just need to scale adoption. Unlike bitcoin mining, most of these would actually decrease emissions too (by avoiding consumption during times with higher marginal grid emission rates).

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