This seems healthy and totes normal
Playing the state’s energy market has become more profitable than mining bitcoin
"On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price soars, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin."
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/08/27/why-texas-republicans-are-souring-on-crypto
@kims Cryptocurrency: Grift on top of scam on top of Ponzi scheme
Speaking of research, this is well-documented with hyperlinks to everything: https://washingtonspectator.org/paranoia-on-parade/
@rberger @kims I am … going to go for "chaotic neutral" on this one, due to my personal experience with my house on the wholesale energy market
The underlying good news on this is that the grid is flooded with cheap clean energy on sunny days, and that's a good thing to begin with, a good thing to end with, and in the middle requires some reassessing assumptions and norms
What I want the future discussion to be is to split:
- What we make with energy
and
- How we generate & timeshift energy
@rberger @kims The Economist is usually better than this, but the article didn't mention batteries, just saying "sell power back to providers" without explaining generation or time-shifting
I can't judge the harmfulness until I know if a loophole exists that's being exploited. In the past we've seen rebates and bonus tariffs — but they're always temporary, always subsidised.
But if it's what I'm using — pure market prices — then it's both sustainable and (partly) virtuous to sell power.
@rberger @kims The sentence "Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself" is about a really interesting dynamic — but shouldn't be so provocative.
Flat tariffs, typical retail pricing is an artificial construct. True demand is variable, and cheap renewable energy (wind & solar) is variable too.
And just as important — battery storage is far easier & cheaper than old nuclear, vaporware modular flavour even more so, and "exists" more than thorium or fusion.
Time-shifting is GOOD …
@rberger @kims The basic mental rearrangement is that Lunch = Cheap, Dinner = Expensive.
And yes that really means you can run a profit AND use more than you export. But only if you consume power when it's … sunny? Windy? Honestly, no harm no foul.
I'm keeping one eye out for abuses of course — and subsidies exist everywhere, exemptions too. If everybody played by the same rules there'd be milk and honey for all.
But "baseload" linear generation & consumption 24/7 is a fiction.
@rberger @kims In my case, I'm absolutely paying a flat fee for grid connection, another for retail operations, and a demand fee for all the grid power I consume 3pm-9pm (yes, I try and succeed to keep that to zero).
Most importantly, the energy I export is worth 10¢/kWh less than the same energy I import.
After all that, I still make a profit most months — not to mention, in the summer half, pumping 3x more solar into the grid than my house consumes.
@rberger @kims A chunk of the reason I can make that profit is the "emergency" days when three or more things go wrong on the grid, e.g. sun has set, wind is seasonally calm, and then an interconnector fails. (Bad Texas, bad bad Texas, you should stop being anti-interconnection with other states because "ideology").
The upshot of this is that I get paid a month's bills in one night, but that's because my energy is SUPER useful to the grid's stability.
Cheaper than building spare power plants!
@rberger @kims So I struggle a bit to criticise *this* element of the crypto miners' operation
In fact … surely … if they're shifting business model, it's an improvement if anything
The final original bitcoin will be mined in a few years anyway, but I'm quite happy to debate "what's a waste of resources" and how to incentivise things correctly … or stop perversions that incentivise the wrong things.
One of the questions is: What resources are limited? We can make > 1000x more solar than now
@rberger @kims The context of that last sentence is that a solar farm the size of Manhattan or Monaco can power entire countries … it's a ridiculously good news story
Solar in 2024 is NOT what solar in 2014 was, or 2019
It's powerful AF.
My house is the tiniest on the street, 100 years old. For several hours in a sunny summer day, I generate 5x more than I can use … if I try REALLY hard. Over a 24-hour period, it's 3x.
Winter is 30% as strong. I sized my system based on my heat pump need.