Comment by Quindecillion
3 years ago
Negative prices on power i.e. curtailment, is the perfect use case for Bitcoin mining.
Obviously there needs to be some amount of battery storage of energy too, but once the storage capacity meets the needs of the local grid, and the batteries are full... what do you do with the excess power?
May as well mine Bitcoin with it and make some profit on that excess energy.
Energy buyer of first and last resort.
Please stop, bitcoin is a waste of electricity, it has no economic value. Its cancerous. Just make hydrogen or some other storable material.
I'm sorry you don't understand the value of Bitcoin.
Your ignorant hate for something you haven't taken the time to understand is cancerous.
So no, I won't stop.
Hydrogen electrolysis and increasing interconnects seem a more useful thing to do.
I haven't followed the technology very closely, but it was my understanding that large scale storage of hydrogen isn't here yet, if it ever will be?
And even if you built out more transmission, you're still limited by how far you can go. On top of that the infrastructure needed to transmit over large distances (1000km) is huge. Then there's a bunch of regulatory red tape to cut through, NIMBY push-back etc.
It's unlikely that a power company has the time, resources, and money to set up such massive transmission projects on top of their core business.
However, it's relatively easy to truck in a bunch of shipping containers filled with ASICs and connected with satellite internet (if in remote areas). Boom, you've just turned negative power prices into positive prices literally overnight.
Maybe such a cost saving gives them the additional capital they need to tackle the larger projects of hydrogen storage or transmission?
> It's unlikely that a power company has the time, resources, and money to set up such massive transmission projects on top of their core business.
The core business of national grid plc is massive transmission projects
Bitcoin would be a perfect use case, immediate turn on/off installation and giving actually a very good return on the money, especially at producer level. Either way, if I were a British tax payer I'd hate this current situation. Any solution, even hydrogen production which looks like a terrible idea, would still be better