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Comment by dollylambda | Hacker News Reader

Dumping excess energy into something like Bitcoin mining is an interesting way to spend excess green energy that would otherwise fizzle. Mining Bitcoin is sort of ideal for this type of situation because it doesn't matter the frequency/time/duration for which you mine Bitcoin, and the coins can be quickly liquidated to recapture revenue.

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Even of we agree it's a good idea most likely this doesn't make financial sense.

Crypto minimg hardware costs a lot of momey upfront, getting outdated fast and to make profit it must run 24/7 which is obviously impossible when there is no energy excess.

True. But if the energy is free then you could probably use last gen hardware too. It must not be worth it still since no one is doing it.

People are doing it, it's just early.

Texas does this. They have lots of deals with data centers to consume additional base load where they basically get load shed first in the summer. Presumably these crypto miners are happy with the arrangement or they wouldn’t have entered into it.

You don't need to run it 24/7 to make a profit because the energy is essentially free or stranded, therefore the only cost is that of the equipment. I think the amount here is more than enough to pay for a few SHA256 specific CPUs attached.

That would work if the energy was actually free. Instead, since it is a single market, as soon as curtailment kicks in you do not get the energy for free anymore, you get it for the price you pay for the gas plants that replace the wind generation which can't be transmitted.

This also doesn't change if you consume all the energy at the place where it is produced, since you still need to supplement the normal load with gas. There's only two ways out of this: split the markets, or build transmission.

Oh well.

Why not just turn off the mining equipment when curtailment kicks in, and flip it back on again when there is excess?

And from the heat of bitcoin mining you could heat homes.

This still faces the rather fundamental problem of getting the excess power from point of generation across the grid to somewhere than can consume it.

Decentralize by throwing out the heater in each house and putting a miner there instead?

You can put up bitcoin miners anywhere.

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