Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts

https://decrypt.co/104878/texas-bitcoin-miners-power-down-heat-wave-grid-rolling-blackouts

by belltaco • 4 years ago

23 16 4 years ago

xeromal• 4 years ago

Good stuff. A 1% savings, but that's does help people's ACs stay on. Texas really should start bumping up their capacity though. It's only going to get hotter.

sharperguy• 4 years ago

In theory, bitcoin mining can help make increasing capacity more economically viable, by buying all excess energy and switching off during load peaks. It all depends on bitcoin contiuing to maintain its value as an asset, though.

Feritio2• 4 years ago

Nope that's just bullshit.

If you would price in co2 creation for no real value you would see that for society (most of us like 99,99999%) it's a net negative.

It also derails investment which would make more sense as the Bitcoin market is decoupled from the normal market.

The local smelter or papermill or any other energy intense industry has to play by totally other rules that Bitcoin.

The fact that they claim that they should down their miners is also not even proven and should make it very unrealistic.

Miners loose tremendous amount of money while not running. They can't afford to just not run for a long period.

And I have seen mining rigs in Texas who uses ac to cool down their shit.

They consume even more.

We start to be smart and accept that energy needs to be used for things helping people not gamblers.

imtringued• 4 years ago

This is a broken window fallacy.

treesknees• 4 years ago

It's over 1%. The peak grid demand according to the article was 78,206 megawatts, and the miners powered down "over 1000 megawatts", so at minimum it was 1.28% savings, potentially higher assuming the grid isn't running at that peak demand mentioned.

I suppose it's good news, but also it's a bit ridiculous that 1-2% (or more) of the entire State of Texas' summer energy usage is being wasted on mining cryptocurrency.

jimmysong• 4 years ago

This is a common misconception. Bitcoin mining is taking electricity generation that would otherwise be wasted. In non-peak demand times the energy is generated anyway and would simply be wasted. Bitcoin mining takes that energy and does something productive with it.

toomuchtodo• 4 years ago

There is ~100GW of solar generation in ERCOT's interconnect queue.

https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/rampant-solar...

As of 30 September [2021] developers had 100.3GW of solar capacity in the queue, 42.4GW of utility-scale battery storage, 22.5GW of wind, 13.5GW of natural gas and minor amounts of other technologies such as biomass.

sephamorr• 4 years ago

This is nothing special - at current bitcoin prices, I don't see how a miner could be profitable with electricity above $100/MWh. They're shutting down (for peak hours) because it's not economic to keep running. The regulator asking for conservation is just window dressing.

badRNG• 4 years ago

Does >1% of all power used feel unreasonably high? I know people complain about Bitcoin power consumption, but I had no idea mining consumed power anyone on this sort of scale. Though, the Texas Blockchain Association may have an interest in overestimating the percentage of power ceded.

Texas Bitcoin Miners Power Down as Heat Wave Threatens Grid with Blackouts

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