Bitcoin miners get $31.7 million in handouts. Way to go Texas! Who's stuck footing the bill to that handout? I'd love to get a 3.56x bonus to not do work all because I decided to shut off my PC and other electrical hardware I need for an entire month.
Interesting you say that but then never elaborate. You made a post earlier saying utility companies are happy bitcoin miners use their wind farms as it keeps their profitability up. I don't understand why you want me to celebrate that like it's a good thing. Do these utility companies then lower the energy bill of consumers? No? Then I don't care about how bitcoin helps already wealthy utility companies keep the grid running so they can churn in more profits that then don't benefit consumers. I've checked my truck temperature when I drive around in Austin. This past August, I saw it climb as high as 119 after it was sitting in a full sun parking lot in East Austin where there's an extreme shortage of tree canopies to keep outdoor temperatures cooler. Instead, because of all the asphalt and lack of canopy, the heat is actually worse in those areas by as much as 10 degrees in some cases. The thought of the grid being used for dumb **** like bitcoin mining is ridiculous. Those solar farms or wind farms could just be used to power homes or small businesses whose business model doesn't involve sucking up massive amounts of energy from utility providers. Bitcoin miners using the grid for what you even agree is a speculative asset no better than beanie babies just seems like a waste. Then to top it off, the utility companies are giving these miners millions of dollars for just shutting things down. It's stupid. I might just be around on this Earth long enough to watch Austin go from a semi-arid tropical climate to a full blown desert in the next 30 to 40 years all because of climate change. Migrants from other states with cooler temperatures are already moving back to other areas just because the weather has gotten so much worse in the past 20 years alone. It's not normal to have 109 degree days in the middle of September in Austin, Texas.
You're approaching this from the wrong view which is being clouded by your opinions of Bitcoin and your feelings of climate change and how things SHOULD be vs how things are. -This is supply vs demand. Generators (wind farms, solar farms, nuclear, hydro, NG, ect ...) vs customers. -There is not unlimited supply nor is there unlimited demand -This is free market. A customer is a customer is a customer. Every customer has their own contract. For low volume customers (ie: residents), they get a very basic contract, which comes from energy providers. As a resident, you agree to X terms for X rate. High volume customers get different terms and rates. This is commercial and industrial rates. People who settle on a low rate variable contract get screwed when there is a long duration energy shortage. boohoo. Get a fixed rate. -Industrial demand is important. They get better rates because generators know how much power is needed in advance to meet their needs. As industry grows, ERCOT can build more generators. Generators are expensive to build, operate and maintain. Nobody is going to build generators for it to sit around, not providing energy until some major 1 year event to occur -It doesn't matter what an entity does with their energy purchase. This is not a social contract, its a business contract. What you're completely failing to understand is when there is an energy shortage/crisis, customers **NEED** energy. Its not a luxury. Businesses still need to operate. People need to cool their homes. However there is a subset of customers who do not NEED the energy. All across the country, energy providers are installing smart meters and offering programs to customers to give them monthly reimbursements (WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT YOURE ASKING FOR) if they are willing to let the providers throttle down their energy usage during peak load. RIOT mining has a unique contract. While most contracts require the energy provide to provide power regardless of demand and crisis, the energy companies have the right to deny energy usage to Bitcoin miners. However if the energy provider chooses to exercise this option, there is a penalty they must pay that customer (the miners). The reasons its structured in this way is because the RIOT and other miners approached them with a unique solution; "We (the miners) will provide you with enough revenue to build, operate and maintain a new generator that you can use anytime you want during load management issues". The bigger challenge is how to deal with the massive spike in energy usage during certain key events. The easiest solution is for Texans to step down from their typical arrogant Texas attitude and join the national grid.
The biggest thing I get from your post is how even the grid recognizes that bitcoin as a business model isn't useful or necessary and that the world would function just fine if bitcoin was never a thing and never consumed energy. People would be livid if ERCOT shut down power to a hospital, forcing the hospital to run it's back up power generators. No one would be livid if all bitcoin mining companies never were a thing because the thing bitcoin manufactures serves no functional purpose. That's why it can be shutdown when real life **** is going on like a natural disaster sweeping through the state. It further reiterates how laughably stupid it is to say that bitcoin is saving Afghanistan women from the Taliban. No one in crisis thinks to themself, if only they had bitcoin to get them out of their jam. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if with some investigative journalism conducted you'd find close ties between the bitcoin mining company founders and existing members of ERCOT. Wouldn't be surprised to find conflicts of interests at all. Power was out in Austin for days this past winter. Not as bad as the 2021 freeze but it was never just about demand. It has a lot to do with Utility companies not winterizing their gear to handle the snowstorm that occurred because Texas claim of being pro-business means being pro-cutting corners to offset additional costs to ensure power remains when weather is at its worst. It also has a lot to do with the fact that a lot of wiring in Texas is above ground whereas midwest states that are accustomed to heavy snow storms know to bury their electrical wiring into the ground. It's more expensive to install your grid underground and also more expensive to repair when **** breaks but it's also safer from harsh weather conditions that could knock down power lines too. States that have historically been accustomed to mild winters but are now experiencing more and more common weather extremes and existing infrastructure that was probably already due for an upgrade decades ago are now confronted with the reality of updating those systems now. This would be inevitable regardless if mining was a thing or not. The cost to upgrade is of course dumped onto consumers but again that just highlights how bitcoin doesn't really do anything to the benefit of consumers indirectly even though people like yourself like to point out how it benefits the grid, because they got an extra generator built which doesn't matter if power lines are knocked down because of a heavy snowstorm in an area that isn't accustomed to snow storms typically. Honestly if you live in Texas and having a working grid in times of crisis is important to you, just make sure you're within a 1 mile radius of a major grocery store chain like HEB or alternatively a hospital. They never shut those places down, and in turn your neighborhood block attached to that same grid won't be either.
The irony of being concerned about climate change and yet anti bitcoin is off the chart. Bitcoin is the best pathway to a sustainable clean energy future. It will take exponentially longer for clean energy tech and investment to come along without bitcoin as a buyer of last resort.
The irony that thinking bitcoin doesn't also consume fossil fuels the overwhelming majority of the time over wind and solar. And again, if wind and solar aren't being used by residences or other modes of business because bitcoin is taking it up, then what are those residences and businesses going to be stuck using? Fossil fuels. Nuclear and gas fastest growing energy sources for Bitcoin mining: Data Some governments can negatively impact Bitcoin's environmental footprint by banning BTC mining, according to new data from Cambridge. That's up there with carbon capture facilities bragging about how much carbon they capture while emitting more carbon than they take out from the air in the process. Shell’s Massive Carbon Capture Plant Is Emitting More Than It’s Capturing A new Global Witness report found that it has the same carbon footprint per year as 1.2 million gas-powered cars.
[ I don't really understand this logic If you want to build a wind farm, you find a windy spot, you get enough money to build a wind farm, and then you build it. It's no more dependent on Bitcoin mining than it is on shoe manufacturing or internet posting or any electricity using activity.
Renewables have inconsistent throughput that cannot dynamically or rapidly respond to changes in demand for power. Bitcoin means you can build your dam/windfarm and use the power you generate for bitcoin to offset cost during periods of low demand and high throughput. This massively lowers the cost of setting up and maintaining renewable energy harvesting operations. This incentive also grows as BTC value goes up.
Exactly, I don't get how a bitcoin-mining energy user is any different than any other energy user if I'm selling windpower - willingness to pay for power is not really a unique qualification - I'm paying for power right now and I am not mining a single bitcoin.
We are an incredibly long way off from "just store it" being feasible. Given how energy demand scales with supply, that day may never even come.
I understand it to mean "more power on sunny days than can be used" and "less power on cloudy days" in the solar context, for example. I don't understand why mining bitcoin is tied to it any more so than any other electricity-using activity, and I don't understand why better battery storage isn't a much better solution to this problem? Lets say I decided to put an ice cream factory next to my solar plant - it would only make ice cream on sunny days. It wouldn't run much in the winter. Did I just solve the variable throughput problem better than bitcoin ever could? I think I just did.
right. why the f would i need bitcoin in this equation..at all. and i am no telsa fanboi but would this not be a case for this: https://www.tesla.com/megapack
Besides Bitcoin being just valuable on its own, it also has the advantage of being site and time independent. You can mine BTC anywhere and anytime you can get power and an internet connection, and what it produces can be sold to anyone on earth in an instant and it will never erode or debase. You want to run a lemonade stand using your solar array during off-hours? Go for it, but good luck making any money that way.
"I have a solution for today at no cost to me but I dont like it because I dont understand it. Therefore lets scrap this idea for something that might work in the future but is not yet ready"
Miners will always use whatever energy source is cheapest to them, right now for most of the world that is carbon. If you want less CO2 getting burned up you need to make renewables affordable and practical, of which Bitcoin is the only natural instrument we have to facilitate that. If you don't think Bitcoin has a purpose no amount of energy usage is ever going to be OK with you, so it's just background noise at this point. Meanwhile it will continue chugging along and improving everyone's lives, whether you like it or not.
Now it's backtracking to okay it doesn't actually help the environment or the grid. Just HODL because it's improving lives whether you want to believe it or not. I don't actually have any basis for these claims but I will cling onto any and everything I can to bitcoin and say it improves upon it even though it really doesn't. Please believe me.
