Comment on Texas grid paid firm to stop mining crypto during heatwave
oce@jlai.lu 1 year ago
I don’t know about this specific case but it’s a common practice to have big consumers be on specific agreements with national greed so they can be shut off on demand to ensure the grid integrity. Of course this is a paid service to compensate for the inconvenience. Usually it’s with heavy industries like metal, paper and glass manufacturers.
Yep. Architected a bunch of software to measure baselines, prove or disprove responses to demands within requested periods etc.
You don’t want giant arc furnaces running full tilt in the midst of an energy crunch. It’s enough compensation to cover NOT producing anything that day which the ratepayers pay for but also benefit from.
Everything had to work sub-second round-trip, fun stuff, egomaniacal boss.
Bobert@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
My knowledge is specific to TVA, but I was privy to such an agreement that a Cryptominer I worked for had.
The Local Utility Provider would bill the company for their usage, but they did not provide the rate. TVA did because of the amount of electricity. This rate is much cheaper than the Utility Provider offers residential customers; economies of scale as well as the inability to store this amount of power meaning it’s “wasted” otherwise. Whenever there is a period of intense usage TVA would provide a 30 minute notice. After the 30 minutes were up the rate provided to us (industry) would more than quadruple, and was actually quite a bit above the residential rate. Residential customers are entirely exempt from this. Your rate, is your rate, is your rate.
The effect of the above meant that it was a mad scramble to shut everything offline whenever we got notice. Otherwise we were losing money. Regular industry trudged along because their bottom line doesn’t care if their power rate quadrupled for 3 hours a dozen days out of the year. It’s not that big a deal.
I definitely got to see the sausage being made, and it’s opened up my mind to some of the ignorance around crypto mining. If anything it drove me further away from being interested in it as anything more than a neat tech demonstration that people figured they could trade.