I learned at an engineering conference recently that one crypto mine in TX, 100s of MW, makes more money off ERCOT demand response markets than it does off crypto repeat: TX ratepayers pay them more to sometimes stop mining than they make by actual mining just bananas misuse of power markets 🔌💡
AI data centers will use even more electricity than bitcoin.
Drone strikes now!
Functionally, it’s a more expensive, less direct, environmentally-problematic way to add spinning capacity to a system that was designed around the idea that market incentives would obviate the need for spinning capacity. In other words, they’re arbitraging the inefficiencies of power deregulation.
There's a lot of bananas stuff going on all over the place.
This might interest you. In this talk Vattenfall in the Nordics outline how some datacentres can be compensated something like *half their own energy costs in a given year* if they can provide between 5 and 20 minutes of relief to the grid 10-20 times a year fast.wistia.net/embed/channe...
The Enron model, except, somehow legal?
I seem to recall consumers getting shafted by variable pricing during demand spikes. Force non-essential, heavy power draw businesses like crypto (or just crypto specifically) onto variable rate plans. Let them pay. Not the other way around.
Couldn’t they just stop selling them electricity so the have enough to sell to everyone else? That seems cheaper
I'm sure Greg Abbott is all over this. 🤪
Texas gonna Texas