Texas grid paid firm to stop mining crypto during heatwave

Comments

• o0joshua0o@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I need to get into the business of being paid to not mine crypto. Sounds lucrative, and I have the skillset already.

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  • bamboo@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Here I am, not mining crypto for free, like some sucker!

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    • Die4Ever@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      if you’re good at something, never do it for free

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• impiri@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  At first glance, this makes zero sense, but once you dig in and read the details, it makes even less sense

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  • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I especially like the part where they say encouraging crypto mining will somehow create power grid innovations. What?

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    • red@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Either you innovate or you pay that company $32M every summer forever

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    • SuiXi3D@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Not in Texas, at least. Our government here is in the habit of actively making everything worse, not better.

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    • FunkyMonk@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Trickle down grid, food, climate, whatever just fucking gimmie peasant. /s

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    • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That has the same energy as someone claiming they drive better tipsy than sober

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  • variants@possumpat.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    pro tip, be born with a parent who runs a large power grid who can buy your debts

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  • b000rg@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Makes sense to me, just sounds like the crypto company is holding the state’s power grid hostage

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    • Bobert@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Who has the keys to free the hostage? ERCOT or the Crypto Mine?

      Don’t blame the Crypto Mine for the decisions of the State or ERCOT.

      TVA doesn’t give energy credits. They give you a thirty minute notice that your ¢/kwh is about to quadruple.

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  • Kalkaline@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    It makes sense if it’s the renewable energy companies using cryptocurrency mining to keep solar and wind energy from going to waste. It makes zero fucking sense when natural gas is still a major part of your energy supply. www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix note the complete lack of a logical sorting on the page.

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    • Wahots@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Even if all you have is wind and solar, you can still turn it into baseload power by pumping water up behind dams, storing it in battery grids, or turning it into green hydrogen via electrolysis. Hell, you could even use it to heat up salts until they turn into a molten salt, which can be used for about 12 hours, going off of solar towers with molten salt generators…

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    • BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Even if that’s their strategy you’re not guaranteed a return when mining. If you or your cluster don’t mine the block all of that energy was absolutely wasted. If we didn’t have a shitty ass isolated grid we could just sell the energy to another part of the country.

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  • Wahots@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You know what they say, whenever the stars are over Texas…

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• Burn_The_Right@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  ERCOT is issuing power shortage warnings across Texas claiming they are due to “low performance of solar and wind technologies”. Absolute fucking liars. It’s sunny as fuck and also windy as fuck in Texas lately. If they are so “low performance”, why does ERCOT continue to heavily invest in them? Goddamn, conservatives are vile, sub-human pieces of shit.

  ERCOT is lying to artificially inflate pricing and increase profits. Governor Abbot has received millions of dollars from them, so the lies are effectively state sanctioned.

  Fuck Abbot and fuck ERCOT. They are a cancer upon Texas.

  There is no such thing as a “good conservative”. No. Such. Thing.

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• tonytins@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Maybe if Texas shutdown those miners, their power grid wouldn’t be so strained all the time.

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  • Cheems@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Maybe if they didn’t have a power grid that was cut off from the rest of the country that wouldn’t be a problem. Maybe their citizens wouldn’t freeze to death when there’s a little snow.

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  • NightAuthor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Those damn people, paying for electricity AND using it?!

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    • BruceTwarzen@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That's like saying it's fine for the Kardashians to use as much water as a whole city during a drought, because they pay for it.

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    • tonytins@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      All you did was make a satirical comment.

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• Uranium3006@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Shut down the big mines

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• Wahots@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  People are still mining bitcoin? Lmao

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  • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    People will always be mining. The cheaper the value, the less miners meaning more coins to sell. It won’t ever fully die.

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• 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.

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  • 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.

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  • MechanicalJester@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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• elxeno@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  you guys are getting paid?

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