Comment by xiphias2
3 years ago
One more thing that can be used for soaking up rarely generated free energy are cheap old inefficient Bitcoin miners.
There are many places already using it for this. Bringing Bitcoin miners to a place at this point is just shipping a container.
This sounds great, but in reality, this concept is also a curse. Moving Bitcoin miners is much easier than building transmission lines - potentially discouraging funding for the infrastructure needed to move the energy where it is more useful. I remember reading of BTC mining companies moving their infrastructure right next door to remote coal fired power plants, getting extremely cheap rates, which otherwise might have been completely decommissioned due to transmission costs.
Carbon tax fixes this.
I don't believe it does. The same phenomenon can occur with a renewable energy source. Remote renewable energy source (solar, hydro etc), not grid connected, could attract the same sort of Bitcoin mining system and even claim to be 'green' - when in fact they are reducing the commercial attractiveness of building the infrastructure to move the energy to the grid, so it might be a net-negative environmental benefit (or at best, negligible, assuming that the mining equipment was originally connected to a dirty grid, rather than new equipment) (and would not be subject to carbon tax).
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Generating a load of heat, when part of the what renewables are for is averting climate change seems counterproductive.
At Earth scale it's not human generated heat that's the problem.
The problem (simplified) is that vast amounts of energy from the Sun fall daily across the globe.
An amount of that energy generates a great deal of heat at the land surface and ocean layer.
Much more heat by magnitudes than humans create.
Some of that heat warms the land, water and lower atmosphere, a great deal of that heat radiates outwards toward space ..
A balance was struck that's been more or less "just right" on average for some 200K years.
We have altered that balance by increasing the insulating properties of the lower atmosphere via increased CO2 (with worse flow on effects from increasing methane and water vapor).
This additional trapped energy is causing more powerful atmospheric events and increased mean tempretures.
But the cause is insulating in very large amounts of energy, not generating small amounts of energy (at the appropriate relative scales).