Bitcoin miner purchases 112-megawatt North Texas wind farm | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin miner purchases 112-megawatt North Texas wind farm

msn.com

19 pointszekrioca32 comments

I have been told to prepare for the worst. Acquire some backup power because data centers and miners will cause brownouts to outages across Texas during peak usage.

We already have some outages in North Texas during these periods of high heat. Your 800k house turns into an oven when it's 110 outside because of the poor building standards across the state. Without steady power and cooling for 5 months of the year, the state is uninhabitable.

Thank you Gov Abbot for deregulation, it is working just like you planned.

On US house sizes and latitudes, solar can provide a hell of a lot of power, at a time that coincides with peak aircon demand, seems a no brainer to me.

You know that people can chose to build a home that’s better insulated on their own right? Poor building standards is a very loose term. Let me explain the problems with your term. 1. Poor - poor to whom? By what measurement? 2. Building standards - do you mean building codes? Building regulations? Consumer demand in design? Something else?

Strict building codes aren’t the answer.

Also, 110 degrees is uninhabitable to who? I can build a home that works just fine at 120 plus and passes ZERO building codes.

Think outside the box, don’t reach for government intervention!

You mentioned poor three times, do you believe that most people can actually do that or that landlords will do it on their own?

I'm sure there's plenty of niches for certain people that can pull this off for themselves, so there'll always be people better off individually, but I don't see this working out for a society as a whole. Best example for this might be the Rio Verde community in AZ, people with well water access may be doing fine, but the 500 others are screwed now that the area is hit by a drought.

https://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/bitcoin-min...

I sincerely hope the seller of the wind farm reinvests the proceeds into a new wind farm!

If so I can probably convince myself this is broadly good news. I don't think the miner was going to switch their data centre off, so I'm pleased they are using renewable energy rather than fossil fuels.

I wonder what the bitcoin price would have to be before they decide to reconnect the wind farm to the grid and start selling electricity instead of burning it mining crypto. I kind of hope that's where we'll end up but history has taught me that bitcoin doesn't want to die, even though Ethereum doesn't need proof of work anymore!

What kind of goods and commodities are traded with Bitcoin?

What is the size of the Bitcoin economy, as in real goods traded with it, not financial and actual currency speculation?

You could ask the same of gold and silver, yet they retain their value.

This is a really interesting solution to the problem with renewable power that there's no way to store it efficiently when demand is low, except batteries which are way too expensive.

They could sell power during the day and mine bitcoin at night, whichever is more profitable at the time.

edit: I just read the article and actually they're not selling power at all. Oh well. Bitcoin must be more profitable than selling the power. The free market at work.

When the spot price of power makes it more profitable to sell power they’ll sell power. When it’s less profitable they’ll mine bitcoin. This makes a lot of power available when it’s needed. Not as good as deploying a grid-scale battery, but better than no wind power.

The wind farm is being disconnected from the South West Power Pool. It won't be selling power publicly anymore, it will only be used for mining.

Coincidentally, I got a call from a West Texas oil man who is burning natural gas. He's too remote and there is no easy way to move the natural gas to market. It's all being wasted. There are companies in Texas that purchase natural gas, but I was skeptical. His idea is to use this free energy to mine bitcoin. Then this article.

So, why not? Unfortunately, I don't know enough to guide him. If you do, contact me and I'll put you in touch.

https://crusoe.ai/energy#dfm

I don't know a lot about it, but remembered that there was a company in Colorado doing something very similar. Seems they've branched out into data centers and AI

Id be quite interested in speaking with him.

Ive spent years in construction and built out quite large projects.

What’s the best way to contact you?

It's funny how humans and companies have mined natural resources for theoretical progress, but we've come to a point that natural resources are being used to mine a fake resource that really serves zero purpose. What an absurd direction technology has gone.

This happens all the time in Saskatchewan, they have such immense natural gas resources that a farmer or the oil company will find a well but it’s not worth connecting to market so the land owner ends up with “free natural gas”. The well might have 5 years worth or 500 years worth for that land owner … depends on a lot of factors

You build a data center close to large reserves that would otherwise be flared or (gasp) vented. You get yourself some rebuilt LM2500's to power it. There's negligible added GHG or carbon footprint if it was otherwise going to waste. Vented methane is much worse than flaring it.

At this scale it should be easy to find and ban miners from your country. They bring nothing of value to the economy.

Well they are bringing “demand for wind farms” and whether that is good or bad or neutral is a matter of analysis.

I don’t personally care for or have any bitcoin or crypto, but I suppose it’s interesting to think about how that functions as a general speculative commodity and how that type of speculation compares to the other types in the economy. A first order analysis might say “buying real assets like grain commodities does more for the economy than buying what amounts to burned up megawatts”, though it is interesting to consider how bitcoin has affected the demand for new electricity build out. We have heard some horror stories of carbon intensive bitcoin mining but there is also more demand for electricity in general and electricity providers will spend some of their build out on green technologies.

All that said I’m pessimistic that simply burning megawatts as a form of market demand generation is even remotely optimal. In my view direct government investment in green energy buildouts would be more economically efficient and environmentally beneficial (I’ve not yet studied how China is doing it but if I wanted to know more about what’s possible I’d certainly research what they are doing). It is probably fair to say “bitcoin as a means of stimulating green energy growth is a poor allocation of finite resources”.

So maybe the net value is zero or negative. But there is some value and some harm this type of thing invites.

By that logic even criminals are of value to an economy. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do everything in our power to prevent crime.

Actually we certainly should not do everything in our power to prevent crime. The net costs would be way too high. We tolerate a certain amount of crime on purpose because preventing all preventable crimes would be prohibitively expensive and restrictive on society.

The fact that we have to pick and choose how to best prevent crime does not mean the crimes themselves are beneficial to our economy. And like I said in my original comment, at this scale it’s easy (and relatively cheap) to ban mining activities that don’t benefit society as a whole.

Not found.

Money > People

Assuming it was sold profitably wouldn't this just cause more to be built?

Exactly. But voters don't want welfare, they want price caps. Even though one works and the other doesn't.

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