> Some of these tactics have proven controversial with consumers. One program that pays big power users like cryptocurrency operations millions to conserve, has come under particular scrutiny, as Texans have been asked to conserve voluntarily for months.
The original idea behind this is sound. Because production and consumption must net to ~0, from the grid's perspective cutting load is just as valuable as providing generative capacity.
Imagine you own a factory that typically runs 24/7 and is part of the system's base load. There is a material cost for you to shut down production. These structures were set up to make it economically viable to have these types of installations shut down in extreme events and function as "virtual power plants" (remember, lowering base load is physically and economically equivalent to providing additional generation.)
So far, this kind of makes sense. But unfortunately the same framework can also be applied to cryptocurrency operations, where it really does not make intuitive sense. Largely, IMO, because Bitcoin is so piggish for energy for so little societal value to start with.
I have a friend who works in the energy industry specifically targeting power grid management.
It is far easier for power companies to manage power loss for things with consistent power usage (low variance) than high variance / inconsistent power loads.
Businesses tend to be very consistent, even if their power draw is high, like manufacturing or hospitals etc.
Residential power tends to be more variant and harder to fine tune for because it can spike quite suddenly in unexpected ways and tends to add more base load over time.
Therefore, it’d actually make more sense for power companies to buy people homes in other states if lowering base load is a concern, since residential is where all the major issues are for load balancing, no?
Maybe they can just price electricity at different tiers of use. Or home vs business rates. Charge crypto farms more, especially if the grid is struggling.
Texas’ strategy is to encourage additional growth in the crypto mining sector because ostensibly they use a lot of power during off-peak days/hours which supports capital payback but also is flexible enough to turn off their load when the grid production is over stressed, so they theoretically won’t contribute to blackouts.
Not sure if this thinking is fully correct, but on its face it’s at minimum not completely absurd.
Also I think some of the Texas leadership is financially or emotionally invested in cryptocurrency.
Texas would never do anything that makes them appear 'anti-business' though. It goes against the entire political ethos of the folks in charge down there.
Texas needs a capacity market, where generators are paid based on their must run status. They choose not to previously because of politics (prioritizing low cost over resiliency). The PUC is working to fix this ("performance credit mechanism").
Is it? There’s not nearly enough information to tell.
Austin Energy appears to charge about 10 cents/kWh (interestingly, it’s comparable across all service classes if I read the tariff sheet right). They pay up to $80/kW saved on average (across all events, I think) [0], I think annually. The webpage is vague. So Austin Energy is effectively paying $80/kW/year of capacity available on 10 minutes notice.
1 kW for a whole year is 8766 kWh, which would cost about $876. And you need to actually be using that kW to resell it as average demand response, so this program is about a 10% discount for being willing to shut down on 10 minutes notice. Or alternatively, you get 10% off in exchange for reducing your SLA a bit :)
Hate bitcoin miners all you like, but the actual payment seems quite reasonable.
It's called demand management / demand response / frequency response. I think that line sounds like a bit of click bait as there isn't much context around it.
I would imagine that the crypto operations also pays a lot of money for generation services - so knowing how much it purchases for electricity vs how much it conserves would add a lot of context. Stating that they get millions (loose numbers) from DM/DR programs is pretty soft reporting and they are providing a grid stabilizing service.
The argument that retail consumers can't get money from DR programs i'm not sure is accurate though don't know what ERCOT currently offers for residential consumers. I know of services that allow consumers to cash in through smart thermostats etc (OhmConnect). Also its a lot cheaper to get a couple large consumers to reduce their usage then aggregating over a large group of houses.
Now if you are trying to argue that this use case for the electricity is wasteful thats another argument or that Texas handling of the grid has been challenged especially the natural gas fiasco - also another argument.
You joke but in August the biggest Bitcoin mine in North America got paid 3.5x more by the utility to turn their rigs off than they made in actual Bitcoin mined -- and they say openly that collecting credits is core to their strategy.
Clearly I need to start Big Resistor Inc. It's just a big connection across the grid that wastes megawatts of energy, but I can get paid for turning it off.
I am curious what it takes to get this sweet deal. Surely anyone can join in the mining and get paid to do nothing on the wonky Texas grid and when you can run - deliver nothing of positive value to society.
Does one need a minimum number of rigs? Maybe a permit? Just apply to the utility?
I’d rather be paid than volunteer to sit around in the dark, sweating like a chump.
I want to buy up all of the old readily available GPUs. No need to fight over new latest gen GPUs to actually produce coins. You just need equipment that looks like you can do mining. Then, voluntarily not mine anything so the power company pays you. That is the actual business model to not ever mine anything.
I grew up in Texas. I honestly think the main problem with the politics there is that they have never had to deal with limited resources, basically ever. Food, water, fuel, land, education, basically everything a society could want was bountiful there. In my lifetime however, that has changed in certain areas.
One of the reasons why I'm so obsessed with transportation alternatives is that I came of age as Austin went from an arguably perfect highway capacity, then suddenly tipped into an unfixable accelerating traffic nightmare. Watching a finite resource (highway capacity) suddenly cross a depletion threshold, and cascade out of control really effected me. Once it happens, nothing can really be done about it except at enormous cost.
We are now seeing the same happening with power capacity. We will soon see it with water as the Ogallala Aquifer disappears.
The type of politically palatable libertarianism that thrives in most of Texas, require effectively unlimited access to resources.
Don't worry, Texas is just helping the crypto miners rather than their citizens again. "The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) paid a bitcoin miner $31.7 million in energy credits in August to not mine bitcoin. During the August heat wave, ERCOT issued eight calls for voluntary energy conservation. People were asked to adjust home thermostats or delay doing laundry during the energy call."
>“His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “Amen.”
Unfortunately not how it works. The reason that Texas is paying miners to load shed is because they are being paid to supply a constant load to the grid. They shut down in order to dump capacity into the grid because that is less expensive than attempting to bring new capacity online to meet demand and then later bring that capacity back down when it is no longer needed. Because of the way miners can ramp up and down their loads systems can be set up to smooth out extreme spikes in electrical demand.
These miners have no choice but to shut down because ERCOT can also remotely kill their ability to consume the load. Part of the payments they get are because of the service being provided to the grid and also to encourage miners to continue operating in good faith by volunteering to load shed and work with grid operators.
The story is even more complex when you throw in things like land being bought to the sum of 240 million for these miners to operate on and locals in areas like this seem excited for the job opportunity so I have to believe good portions of that 34 million are making its way right back into the local economy of central Texas.
The reason Bitcoin mining works and not your space heater is because of the incentive structures built into the proof of work system within Bitcoin.
I think this is worth digging into deeper and figuring out how we can objectively measure if this is successful or not. I think there is a legitimate counter argument to make that without mining actually, Texas would have had a full grid blackout this summer.
>The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) paid a bitcoin miner $31.7 million in energy credits
Politicians are utterly useless. They all herded to the crypto grift frenzy as if this was going to do anything for the local economy. Wonder how it's turning out? The 2021 fad has subsided, now they are paying customers to mine coins? Beyond stupid.
Step 1: get in power.
Step 2: make government smaller by dismantling systems made to protect the public.
Step 3: grift.
Step 4: "See, governments are all grifters! Never vote for people who ask for bigger governments."
Step 5: goto step 1
Did they all get in on the crypto grift frenzy? I know in Canada there's a certain political slant (up to and including the leader of our official opposition who spoke highly of bitcoin) that seemed more enamored with it than the rest.
It sounds like they're dancing around what may be a social issue; ERCOT sent an email asking people to "conserve", within 30 minutes they saw a negative impact. Is it possible some recipients saw the email and took the complete opposite action?
It wouldn't surprise me if after an email telling them to lower their consumption, consumers would anticipate the worst and instead decide to recharge any electrical appliances reliant on batteries (Power banks, EVs, etc...) "just in case".
I do make my house a few degrees colder and charge batteries every time I get an emergency message from ERCOT this summer. Part of it is simply tragedy of the commons - I'm 10^-6% of the regional grid usage and have little individual effect on the grid, but will suffer more if I don't get mine while I can. Think about whether you want to discourage honesty before you downvote. I've made my house extra well insulated with efficient zoned AC units otherwise, so I'm not an energy abuser in general.
I have an rational distrust of ERCOT's grid management given my experience of freezing for a week in 2021. What's more the current situation is entirely preventable(who could predict summer in TX would be hot?!) so I rebel at suffering to compensate for ERCOT's negligence and corruption.
They don't just send emails, they also send texts. Given that this is the 7th time they've done this in the past ~2 weeks, if anything I would expect people to be more likely to ignore the messages now, since (from the perspective of residents) nothing obviously bad happened the other 6 times.
The difference is that this was the first time that they followed up the first message with a second one when reserves became critically low and the frequency started dropping. But by the time I saw the second message, it was obvious from their dashboards that the situation was well on its way to being resolved, so I'm doubtful the second message had much affect either way.
I wouldn't doubt that at all. During covid it became clear to me that there is a large part of the population that does the opposite of what any authority figure tells them regardless of how much sense it makes, just to be spiteful & show how 'uncontrolled' they are.
ERCOT is not "the power company". They're the marketplace where many power companies exchange. And they probably do know a bit of what happened but aren't going to share preliminary information until deeper analysis is complete.
The power marketplace company should actually have better information on questions like “did a powerplant selling into the market go offline” than anyone except the plant operator, and should have more information about the impact than anyone.
From how the headline was worded, I was expecting an interesting answer explaining the 'why' but the article is focused on grid stability with the headline's answer being "dunno, maybe because it was hot" -- except the article implies this was not a single hot day but part of a larger trend.
That is what I thought. IF a power plant went offline, wouldn't they know it? Aren't they measuring all of their production, so they could pinpoint what plant dropped?
the more I read about ERCOT, the texas energy council, the more im convinced its a grift that wasnt designed to survive the test of climate change.
ERCOT reform was announced by Governor Abbott in 2021, but that same reform was also penned in a nearly 400 page report that was completely ignored during ERCOT's 2011 failure.
This is politics in a nutshell. People keep voting for the same politicians so they keep the same problems. Power infrastructure is poor? Keep voting for the same people that made it that way. Lots of violent crime in your city? Keep voting for the people that release criminals back into society immediately.
Politics is so binary and broken in this country that we are just making fixable issues into permanent hardships.
This is a Dem and Rep problem and more importantly the end result of a 2 party system.
I understand your point, but if I let the $OTHER party get control, they will work against my beliefs on Abortion and Guns, which are the only 2 beliefs that the parties have together taught me matters...
You are 100% correct. Thats what we are missing.
Additional parties that perhaps hold party A's thoughts on Abortion and Guns but maybe share party B's thoughts on immigration or health care or whatever. The country really needs choice.
I'm a swing voter, I vote both R and D. To the best of my knowledge I have never met another one in real life. I know they do exist though. I find myself voting one party at the state level and another at the federal level. Both parties have stances I agree and disagree with. I would love a party that does the same.
If you over-simplify, stereotype and demean people who disagree with you, you're part of the problem.
Honestly if it was that simple, then maybe we should just say no more killing babies and let the hunters shoot their deer and otherwise move forward with the rest of the Democratic party's platform.
I live in a red state whose natural environment has been devastated by Republican policies for over a century. What people see here today is a remnant of primordial old-growth wilderness. But they think it's natural and how it's always been. Similarly to the way that austerity drives struggle and suffering for working class families, but they continue voting conservative against their own self-interest. The worse it gets, the more they vote Republican. Like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown right as he is about to kick it.
Democrats have been pushing for sustainability and a national rollout of renewable energy since at least the 1960s, definitely before the Earth First! movement of the 1980s, and probably all the way back to the strengthening of national parks by Teddy Roosevelt during the Progressive Era around 1900. It's odd to imagine a Republican as an environmentalist today, but there used to be many. That helps us to understand how the parties flipped due to stuff like Nixon's Southern Strategy.
We can blame Democrats for urban sprawl, high state sales tax, red tape/overregulation, basic hypocrisy in not living sustainably at an individual level and subscribing to neoliberalism like Republicans. But the economic and environmental problems we face today are mostly a result of decades of anti-sustainability legislation and subsidies for fossil fuel companies by Republicans. To say otherwise is revisionist history and not the academic view IMHO.
With the 100 year storms hitting the south every 2-10 years now, the environmental bill is coming due. It's all but certain that some number of southern states will flip blue. It will be interesting to see if that improves their infrastructure, or if it's too late.
But I do agree with you about the dysfunction. When the Boomers pass, I wonder if the parties will flip again and introduce a whole new set of wedge issues to argue about incessantly as the world burns.
That's exactly my point though. It's only a fallacy because of your particular view on certain topics. For some people it's guns and abortion, for you it's the environment.
Imagine the world from the point of view of some one that truly believes that abortion is the murder of little children. I really mean it, just for 30 seconds.
We all have these core issues that we hold most dear and assume others must as well. Many people care far more about social issues than the environment or taxation or whatever their 'it' is.
Having only 2 parties forces us to choose the party that best represents our 'it' but to also vote for the myriad of other policies we may disagree with. We very much dislike the other party though because they have the opposite stance on our 'it'.
"It's all but certain that some number of southern states will flip blue" Florida is redder than ever. I encourage you to pause and reflect on the why of that. It's very much not because the voters are stupid, they have other 'its' that are important to them.
This is the first I've seen data on high demand growth this summer (I live in Texas and try to follow these issues).
> The power grid has seen overall demand grow 7% this summer, after two decades of predictable 1% per year growth, and 10 preliminary demand records since late June. [1]
What's stopping power companies from ramping up energy production? They know in advance there will be problems. What stopping them from just producing more? I realize there are some peculiarities of the Texas grid, but this is obviously a problem beyond Texas, as California and east coast has blackouts as well. I'm asking about all these cases.
I imagine maybe this requires some additional infrastructure that simply doesn't exist. If so, what's the barrier to building this infrastructure?
When you're already running at full tilt, how are you going to ramp up energy production? You then need to build more.
Building and connecting takes time. Texas has added several state's worth of energy to the grid in the past few years. The peak hit at the 2021 winter storm was 76GW, far higher than any normal time historically. This summer, just two years later, Texas is going >85GW of power demand every day.
For comparison, New York's projected peak demand is only 32GW for this summer. So Texas' demand grew by an additional 1/3 of New York's entire demand in just 2 years. That's a massive amount of growth!
They're already incentivized to do this because the price varies with demand. Providers that can vary their output (at least some natural gas and coal sources) already do this on a daily basis, which you can see here: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix
The overnight low price is typically $20-$30/MWh. Yesterday during the shortage the price peaked at $5000/MWh, which I suspect might be an upper limit.
I live in Texas and we’ve been dancing on the edge of energy availability for weeks now. If you glance at ERCOT’s public graphs that estimate energy supply and demand, every evening we’re barely eeking by. From what I’ve heard, this should be improving daily as temperatures ease, but I guess not. Surprising that we had an emergency episode in September rather than two weeks ago.
If Texas can’t supply enough energy in the summer, I have no hope for what our future winters will look like.
I feel like TX is doing more to push for energy independence than any other single organization in the country. the grid incompetence, and governments unwillingness to resolve, is the best driver for household battery and solar I can this of.
I don't live in TX, but if I didn't have 1day battery storage, coupled with solar capability to charge that battery to full in a single day, with a generator as backup, every ounce of effort would be going to that.
While that would work well in summer, and this current issue, the outlook isn’t so good for Texas winters. I recently spoke with another Texan who has had solar + batteries for a couple years.
Apparently, in our area, winters are so cloudy that their solar panels (which cover 100% of energy usage in summer) don’t cover but 20% of their usage in the winter.
No reasonable amount of batteries can ward off grid concerns with those inefficiencies.
I didn’t live here in previous years, but I think it’s abnormal that multiple days in a week demand is estimated to be above supply.
And yes, it’s most efficient to keep supply and demand close. But based on this article and our recent trends, it seems like there’s some trouble / concern with unlocking the extra energy needed to supply everyone lately.
As a Texan, I think whats going on in Texas, perhaps controversially is what happens when you have an over reliance on solar and wind as primary power sources. Even in Texas (where wind is basically ever-present) there are times when the wind does not blow.
I think wind and solar are great, and we should build more, but you also need a sizable amount of thermal generation (preferably nuclear) to provide for base load.
I dont think thermal can be replaced readily with gas turbine, battery, pumped storage, or other forms of rapid spin up equipment.
I have the somewhat controversial opinion that things like bitcoin are useful because they create static demand, and by doing so make the excess generation from wind and solar economical, thereby keeping the spot price in the grid high enough that thermal generation is still cost effective to build and operate - I dont think we should be paying them to shut down, they should just be disconnected wholesale from the grid during periods of ultra high demand as a condition of their interconnection to it.
The real issue in texas is not enough thermal generation capacity - I'd prefer it be nuclear, but right now its gas, and we dont have enough based on the states growth.
> The call came, the group said, as heat drove energy demand up and wind power was forecasted to be low.
Renewable energy is not reliable or stable enough to be as large of a share of the power grid as it already is. ERCOT is running into this first because it’s a smaller grid and has less margin for error, but the other two US grids are going to have the same problem in time.
So based on that[1], it looks like the issue is that solar and wind capacity is forecasted to dip right around the time demand peaks? And there's basically no battery storage available (4,835 MW of maximum storage output vs the 61,549 MW maximum combined output for wind+solar)?
Do you have any supporting evidence for that? becuase i have seen EV's power entire homes when the power is cut, which kind of sounds like the opposite. I have also seen most 'smart' chargers take demand into account when charging up your car.
Massive solar deployment is a great clean energy source to add to the existing plants. However, it isn't a solid baseline source without storage/batteries.
This is where EVs can help if they have V2G aka bidirectional charging capabilities.
Nuclear will take years if not decades to solve the problems but solar can be deployed in months or a year with the right incentives.
EVs might become a large part of the grid's energy storage, smoothing out these conditions of solar/wind shortages.
If ERCOT is paying bitcoin miners to not mine, I don't see why they wouldn't be willing to pay EV owners for some storage capacity and cooperative charge scheduling.
Unpopular opinion (and so strange that a red state like Texas did it this way), but: Texas is far too dependent on wind power, fossil fuel plants (even natural gas!) being shut down at the behest of the federal govt, and definitely not enough nuclear, although those can take quite a few years to come online.
Wait, so instead of charging their crypto mining customers more, they are paying them not to mine? WTF? You have to love their "free market" energy grid /s
There's a lot of misunderstanding in the comments so far regarding bitcoin mining incentives. I urge you to read this thread describing the split-second load-shedding response time from the POV of one of these miners:
It also goes into the other mechanism by which they make money (being natural sellers of future energy demand contracts during times of high demand). This mechanism is similar to how other commodity markets operate with producers, consumers with steady future demand, and consumers with unpredictable short-term demand.
Our energy grids need to keep an equal demand/production at all times, and on-demand load-shedding is a valuable part of this equation. The bitcoin miners are providing a service to ERCOT and being paid for it. If there were a more "productive" source of on-demand energy usage, then it will replace the bitcoin miners, this is how markets work (of which both energy production/consumption and capitalism in general are).
This is the reality of how the texas energy grid works at present. The bitcoin miners, for lack of a (subjectively) "better" option, are filling the two needs of elastic load-shedding and predictable future demand. The first is very hard to fill, the latter can probably be fulfilled more productively with steady demand from other industries (factories, data centers, other things that run 24h per day).
One more edit: this whole equation changes COMPLETELY if we have the ability to store energy production in times of low demand to be used in future times of high demand (batteries). We don't currently have this at any sort of reasonably useful scale, we need this, and the current "market" everyone is upset about is a bandaid on top of the lack of decent storage options. For the climate folks, the anti-bitcoin folks, whoever disagrees with what I've said here: Fix the storage issue and everything gets magically better. Good luck, it's a very hard problem with very nasty environmental impacts, I'm rooting for you.
Alternatively, a better option: as a human need, maybe energy production shouldn’t _strictly_ follow market incentives and shouldn’t be _solely_ governed by supply/demand dynamics
Totally agree! But this isn't the reality we live in today and you have proposed a potentially better option with no ideas on how to achieve it. What you need to focus on is how we can grow a better grid while achieving prepaid usage levels, guaranteed usage levels, and on-demand response. These factors are what lead to a more efficient, more climate friendly, more better etc etc grid.
Saying they're "providing a service" by turning off in peak times is kind of a ridiculous phrasing. Normal consumers in normal markets don't buy at peak because peak pricing is quite expensive. Flipping the equation to paying people to not buy something and calling it a service is outrageous. It exposes the grid as something that literally cannot work on free market principles. People are right to be outraged.
This just isn't how the grid works. Texas has added more than double the amount of renewable energy than any other state grid in the last two years. These investments introduce variable production and require on-demand response to keep the demand/consumption balance steady. Normal / residential consumers do not have a steady demand, don't prepay power usage, and don't guarantee future power usage. All of these factors are what make industrial demand response valuable and necessary for the modernizing, increasingly-renewable based, power grid. ERCOT isn't perfect, I think there are areas for vast improvement, but I think your comment is a little uninformed as to how the grid currently works and will be working in the future as we increase renewable production.
According to my Google foo, around 1000 people per day have been moving to Texas in the last three years alone. Put anywhere between a half million to three quarters of a million additional people on the power grid in a three year span and the grid is bound to have issues.
Also, really like how the majority of the comments sound like Reddit /r/politics's far left, adult man child, ignorant insights.
I actually think it’s the only somewhat good thing about Texas’ grid. What better way to ensure Island configuration works than running that mode all the time?
Before the blockchain hate gets too intense just wanted to remind that Bitcoin is the odd one out using a proof-of-work algorithm. Pretty much every other project uses a security technique that is light on power-consumption.
If you had lived through the last blackout and still lived in Texas, then absolutely yes it’s newsworthy. We want to grade our government accurately. Almost having a collapse again is a bad mark on the test score.
Yes, lets keep news coverage focused only on disasters after they've happened.
Let's keep our heads down in the sand when the cracks are starting to show and when there still might be time to adapt to what's going on before the disaster strikes.
Nothing happened, so nothing to see here. Everything is working perfectly, move along.
... Does something need to be an abject disaster in order to be newsworthy? This is so strange to me as a position.
In case you were asking this in good faith: Yeah, it is, for a buncha reasons. I'll theorycraft a few from my uneducated position:
1) There was a public mass email sent out, but followup wasn't forthcoming, so people might want to know what happened. People often turn to the news for this function.
b) There was grid failure that resulted in deaths because it got too cold out a while back, so people might want to know if it's likely to happen again, once more making the news about the conditions involved relevant, because it wasn't too cold this time.
iii) Some people rely on electricity to stay alive in a very-direct, medical sense, and might be so interested enough in the power grid's disposition to be concerned if someone at ERCOT farts out of turn.
Also, yes, the news routinely reports on things that almost happened. I don't even own cable TV and I know that.
Regional blackouts are kinda common in Texas. The article briefly mentions the AC frequency doing too can damage the grid. This damage can actually lead to months long power outages for large regions.
It would have had blackouts if it didn't build all those bitcoin mines. The bitcoin mines encouraged power infrastructure development, and they can just be taken offline when high heat causes power demand spikes for air conditioning.
I'm not from Texas so genuinely asking, is there hard proof that anyone specifically invested in power infrastructure because of bitcoin mines in a way they wouldn't have otherwise?
> I'm not from Texas so genuinely asking, is there hard proof that anyone specifically invested in power infrastructure because of bitcoin mines in a way they wouldn't have otherwise?
In theory supply and demand still exists in Texas, and Bitcoin miners do demand a lot of energy. Assuming that energy companies are including Bitcoin miners in their demand projections (I don't see why they wouldn't?) then the default assumption is that just based on the market forces at play, capacity should have been built with Bitcoin miner demand included.
This is the same logic that says bitcoin encouraged green power building but in reality they just absorb the excess power from the cheapest source available so they're essentially offsetting any new power generation by simply consuming more power when it's available. They anchor the rate around what is profitable to mine at so power doesn't get lower unless/until mining becomes less profitable.
Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations, it seems that a power company would make more money selling wholesale power to the open market in ERCOT than it would mining bitcoin.
The simple fact of the matter is Texas does not have sufficient electrical generation capacity to satiate its demands, especially given the record spate of hot days (it's been daily highs above 100F in Austin for two months). There's no need to add extra sources of demand to encourage new supply.
People literally freezing to death amidst billions of dollars of water damage to homes via busted pipes didn't encourage the state to upgrade its infrastructure.
Just a few months ago on HN there was a thread discussing the upcoming summer.
Was surprised just how many 'free-market' advocates came out to say how great things were, how the market has created additional supply, and all this was just lib panic.
They are paying 'crypto-miners' to temporarily stop running? That is absurd. So I could make money just by moving a mining operation to Texas, and wait for a shutdown.
How much failure does it take to realize some regulation is good. It benefits everyone.
The market did create a ton of supply. It added so much supply electric contracts went as low as $0.10/kWh including delivery costs at the start of the summer. It added several state's worth of supply. Its just people demanded even more with 7x more growth in demand than historical.
That is a pretty misleading presentation, because of the cherry-picked dates and conflating (apparently) capacity-related outages with public safety shutoffs, and for not weighting by population impact.
California has not had any capacity-related problems in the past 2 years, mostly due to the fact that they now have 5.5GW of battery backup capacity that covers the critical period at dusk, when solar generation is headed for zero, during late summer where the days are getting shorter but it is still hot.
> they now have 5.5GW of battery backup capacity that covers the critical period at dusk, when solar generation is headed for zero, during late summer where the days are getting shorter but it is still hot
Am I supposed to interpret "covers critical period at dusk..." as the "hours" part of 5.5GW? Because I'm having trouble grokking what is the actual battery backup capacity described here... Does CA have battery capacity that can last a single evening @ 5.5GW of load?
MI downtime is a result of cutting back on expensive tree trimming and other upkeep functions. We had a good run of very light storms but we’re back to normal wind and all those tree limbs that should have been taken care of now are adding up the down time.
> Some of these tactics have proven controversial with consumers. One program that pays big power users like cryptocurrency operations millions to conserve, has come under particular scrutiny, as Texans have been asked to conserve voluntarily for months.
This is... amazing. Not in a good way.
The original idea behind this is sound. Because production and consumption must net to ~0, from the grid's perspective cutting load is just as valuable as providing generative capacity.
Imagine you own a factory that typically runs 24/7 and is part of the system's base load. There is a material cost for you to shut down production. These structures were set up to make it economically viable to have these types of installations shut down in extreme events and function as "virtual power plants" (remember, lowering base load is physically and economically equivalent to providing additional generation.)
So far, this kind of makes sense. But unfortunately the same framework can also be applied to cryptocurrency operations, where it really does not make intuitive sense. Largely, IMO, because Bitcoin is so piggish for energy for so little societal value to start with.
You achieve similar results by simply charging such customers current market rates. Nobody is going to be mining Bitcoin while paying 2.50$/kWh.
That’s the objection, it’s simply a waste of money.
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I have a friend who works in the energy industry specifically targeting power grid management.
It is far easier for power companies to manage power loss for things with consistent power usage (low variance) than high variance / inconsistent power loads.
Businesses tend to be very consistent, even if their power draw is high, like manufacturing or hospitals etc.
Residential power tends to be more variant and harder to fine tune for because it can spike quite suddenly in unexpected ways and tends to add more base load over time.
Therefore, it’d actually make more sense for power companies to buy people homes in other states if lowering base load is a concern, since residential is where all the major issues are for load balancing, no?
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Maybe they can just price electricity at different tiers of use. Or home vs business rates. Charge crypto farms more, especially if the grid is struggling.
Texas’ strategy is to encourage additional growth in the crypto mining sector because ostensibly they use a lot of power during off-peak days/hours which supports capital payback but also is flexible enough to turn off their load when the grid production is over stressed, so they theoretically won’t contribute to blackouts.
Not sure if this thinking is fully correct, but on its face it’s at minimum not completely absurd.
Also I think some of the Texas leadership is financially or emotionally invested in cryptocurrency.
They already do this. Commercial rates are cheaper than residential rates.
(Residential customers are getting ripped off, honestly)
Texas would never do anything that makes them appear 'anti-business' though. It goes against the entire political ethos of the folks in charge down there.
That would require admitting that the free market can't solve the problem, and likely makes it worse.
Texas needs a capacity market, where generators are paid based on their must run status. They choose not to previously because of politics (prioritizing low cost over resiliency). The PUC is working to fix this ("performance credit mechanism").
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/01/texas-power-market-p...
That doesn’t gel with lobbyists.
Wat? There isnt already such a thing?
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Is it? There’s not nearly enough information to tell.
Austin Energy appears to charge about 10 cents/kWh (interestingly, it’s comparable across all service classes if I read the tariff sheet right). They pay up to $80/kW saved on average (across all events, I think) [0], I think annually. The webpage is vague. So Austin Energy is effectively paying $80/kW/year of capacity available on 10 minutes notice.
1 kW for a whole year is 8766 kWh, which would cost about $876. And you need to actually be using that kW to resell it as average demand response, so this program is about a 10% discount for being willing to shut down on 10 minutes notice. Or alternatively, you get 10% off in exchange for reducing your SLA a bit :)
Hate bitcoin miners all you like, but the actual payment seems quite reasonable.
[0] https://savings.austinenergy.com/commercial/offerings/load-m...
What if you only run the 1% of the year that you think is most likely to require spare capacity?
(hopefully they have safeguards against that?)
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It's called demand management / demand response / frequency response. I think that line sounds like a bit of click bait as there isn't much context around it.
I would imagine that the crypto operations also pays a lot of money for generation services - so knowing how much it purchases for electricity vs how much it conserves would add a lot of context. Stating that they get millions (loose numbers) from DM/DR programs is pretty soft reporting and they are providing a grid stabilizing service.
The argument that retail consumers can't get money from DR programs i'm not sure is accurate though don't know what ERCOT currently offers for residential consumers. I know of services that allow consumers to cash in through smart thermostats etc (OhmConnect). Also its a lot cheaper to get a couple large consumers to reduce their usage then aggregating over a large group of houses.
Now if you are trying to argue that this use case for the electricity is wasteful thats another argument or that Texas handling of the grid has been challenged especially the natural gas fiasco - also another argument.
So... start a "cryptocurrency" business and get paid to not use electricity.
I mean, if that's not a good way to funnel money from the lower classes to the rich, I don't know what is.
You joke but in August the biggest Bitcoin mine in North America got paid 3.5x more by the utility to turn their rigs off than they made in actual Bitcoin mined -- and they say openly that collecting credits is core to their strategy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/06/texas-paid-bitcoin-miner-rio...
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Clearly I need to start Big Resistor Inc. It's just a big connection across the grid that wastes megawatts of energy, but I can get paid for turning it off.
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I am curious what it takes to get this sweet deal. Surely anyone can join in the mining and get paid to do nothing on the wonky Texas grid and when you can run - deliver nothing of positive value to society.
Does one need a minimum number of rigs? Maybe a permit? Just apply to the utility?
I’d rather be paid than volunteer to sit around in the dark, sweating like a chump.
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I want to buy up all of the old readily available GPUs. No need to fight over new latest gen GPUs to actually produce coins. You just need equipment that looks like you can do mining. Then, voluntarily not mine anything so the power company pays you. That is the actual business model to not ever mine anything.
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is this what they mean by privatizing profits and socializing losses
It’s a cute saying, but that really doesn’t make sense in this situation. How is society taking a loss?
No, this is called, "It never trickled down, it only funneled up!"
I grew up in Texas. I honestly think the main problem with the politics there is that they have never had to deal with limited resources, basically ever. Food, water, fuel, land, education, basically everything a society could want was bountiful there. In my lifetime however, that has changed in certain areas.
One of the reasons why I'm so obsessed with transportation alternatives is that I came of age as Austin went from an arguably perfect highway capacity, then suddenly tipped into an unfixable accelerating traffic nightmare. Watching a finite resource (highway capacity) suddenly cross a depletion threshold, and cascade out of control really effected me. Once it happens, nothing can really be done about it except at enormous cost.
We are now seeing the same happening with power capacity. We will soon see it with water as the Ogallala Aquifer disappears.
The type of politically palatable libertarianism that thrives in most of Texas, require effectively unlimited access to resources.
Don't worry, Texas is just helping the crypto miners rather than their citizens again. "The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) paid a bitcoin miner $31.7 million in energy credits in August to not mine bitcoin. During the August heat wave, ERCOT issued eight calls for voluntary energy conservation. People were asked to adjust home thermostats or delay doing laundry during the energy call."
I think I have to set up shop in Texas with some space heaters and claim my bitcoin energy credits!
>“His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn't earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major's father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbours sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counselled one and all, and everyone said “Amen.”
The more things change eh
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Unfortunately not how it works. The reason that Texas is paying miners to load shed is because they are being paid to supply a constant load to the grid. They shut down in order to dump capacity into the grid because that is less expensive than attempting to bring new capacity online to meet demand and then later bring that capacity back down when it is no longer needed. Because of the way miners can ramp up and down their loads systems can be set up to smooth out extreme spikes in electrical demand.
These miners have no choice but to shut down because ERCOT can also remotely kill their ability to consume the load. Part of the payments they get are because of the service being provided to the grid and also to encourage miners to continue operating in good faith by volunteering to load shed and work with grid operators.
The story is even more complex when you throw in things like land being bought to the sum of 240 million for these miners to operate on and locals in areas like this seem excited for the job opportunity so I have to believe good portions of that 34 million are making its way right back into the local economy of central Texas.
The reason Bitcoin mining works and not your space heater is because of the incentive structures built into the proof of work system within Bitcoin.
I think this is worth digging into deeper and figuring out how we can objectively measure if this is successful or not. I think there is a legitimate counter argument to make that without mining actually, Texas would have had a full grid blackout this summer.
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My thought too and a perfect example of the Cobra effect :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...
Yeah, but if they pay you to not mine Bitcoin and then find out you're not mining Bitcoin, won't you be in trouble?
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>The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) paid a bitcoin miner $31.7 million in energy credits
Politicians are utterly useless. They all herded to the crypto grift frenzy as if this was going to do anything for the local economy. Wonder how it's turning out? The 2021 fad has subsided, now they are paying customers to mine coins? Beyond stupid.
> Politicians are utterly useless.
Step 1: get in power. Step 2: make government smaller by dismantling systems made to protect the public. Step 3: grift. Step 4: "See, governments are all grifters! Never vote for people who ask for bigger governments." Step 5: goto step 1
Did they all get in on the crypto grift frenzy? I know in Canada there's a certain political slant (up to and including the leader of our official opposition who spoke highly of bitcoin) that seemed more enamored with it than the rest.
The payment was to not mine coins and thus conserve electricity to more important consumers during times of shortages
You too can smelt bauxite at home !
The article states that the sharp drop in reserves was being “investigated,” and that it is “suspected” that a large power plant stopped working.
Is observability of Texan infrastructure so poor that the _power company_ doesn’t have a comprehensive view of _which power plants are operational_?
It sounds like they're dancing around what may be a social issue; ERCOT sent an email asking people to "conserve", within 30 minutes they saw a negative impact. Is it possible some recipients saw the email and took the complete opposite action?
It wouldn't surprise me if after an email telling them to lower their consumption, consumers would anticipate the worst and instead decide to recharge any electrical appliances reliant on batteries (Power banks, EVs, etc...) "just in case".
Bank/toilet paper rush style.
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I do make my house a few degrees colder and charge batteries every time I get an emergency message from ERCOT this summer. Part of it is simply tragedy of the commons - I'm 10^-6% of the regional grid usage and have little individual effect on the grid, but will suffer more if I don't get mine while I can. Think about whether you want to discourage honesty before you downvote. I've made my house extra well insulated with efficient zoned AC units otherwise, so I'm not an energy abuser in general.
I have an rational distrust of ERCOT's grid management given my experience of freezing for a week in 2021. What's more the current situation is entirely preventable(who could predict summer in TX would be hot?!) so I rebel at suffering to compensate for ERCOT's negligence and corruption.
They don't just send emails, they also send texts. Given that this is the 7th time they've done this in the past ~2 weeks, if anything I would expect people to be more likely to ignore the messages now, since (from the perspective of residents) nothing obviously bad happened the other 6 times.
The difference is that this was the first time that they followed up the first message with a second one when reserves became critically low and the frequency started dropping. But by the time I saw the second message, it was obvious from their dashboards that the situation was well on its way to being resolved, so I'm doubtful the second message had much affect either way.
I'll admit that when I get the "turn your AC off from noon to 3 pm" email at 8 AM, I go turn it down so that I can turn it off at noon.
I don't know if this thermal battery helps much.
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I wouldn't doubt that at all. During covid it became clear to me that there is a large part of the population that does the opposite of what any authority figure tells them regardless of how much sense it makes, just to be spiteful & show how 'uncontrolled' they are.
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I can see that- if I got a grid warning first thing I'd do is make sure all my batteries are topped up.
something something ... cold dead hands?
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Gotta turn the AC way up if you think there will be no power soon
Texans like their guns and demand freedom so probably.
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The grid operator knows immediately, but it is confidential [1]. Similar "CEII" rules are enforced by FERC for the other US grids.
[1] https://www.ercot.com/files/docs/2018/09/28/902NPRR-01_ERCOT...
ERCOT is not "the power company". They're the marketplace where many power companies exchange. And they probably do know a bit of what happened but aren't going to share preliminary information until deeper analysis is complete.
The power marketplace company should actually have better information on questions like “did a powerplant selling into the market go offline” than anyone except the plant operator, and should have more information about the impact than anyone.
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From how the headline was worded, I was expecting an interesting answer explaining the 'why' but the article is focused on grid stability with the headline's answer being "dunno, maybe because it was hot" -- except the article implies this was not a single hot day but part of a larger trend.
That is what I thought. IF a power plant went offline, wouldn't they know it? Aren't they measuring all of their production, so they could pinpoint what plant dropped?
the more I read about ERCOT, the texas energy council, the more im convinced its a grift that wasnt designed to survive the test of climate change.
ERCOT reform was announced by Governor Abbott in 2021, but that same reform was also penned in a nearly 400 page report that was completely ignored during ERCOT's 2011 failure.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2021/03/26/in-20-ye...
It seems very much like a Texan good 'ol boys club. At least, that's my best attempt at understanding the root causes of the dysfunction here?
Sounds very similar to Californians PGE. It’s run like a dumpster fire ($0.30/kWh which is ridiculous) and the system is falling apart.
The best part is the governor complains yet PGE can’t restock toilet paper without CPUC approval and guess who sits on CPUC? The governors appointees.
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I think the root cause may be a retail market for something that should be a public utility?
This is politics in a nutshell. People keep voting for the same politicians so they keep the same problems. Power infrastructure is poor? Keep voting for the same people that made it that way. Lots of violent crime in your city? Keep voting for the people that release criminals back into society immediately.
Politics is so binary and broken in this country that we are just making fixable issues into permanent hardships.
This is a Dem and Rep problem and more importantly the end result of a 2 party system.
That and corruption all the way down.
I understand your point, but if I let the $OTHER party get control, they will work against my beliefs on Abortion and Guns, which are the only 2 beliefs that the parties have together taught me matters...
You are 100% correct. Thats what we are missing. Additional parties that perhaps hold party A's thoughts on Abortion and Guns but maybe share party B's thoughts on immigration or health care or whatever. The country really needs choice.
I'm a swing voter, I vote both R and D. To the best of my knowledge I have never met another one in real life. I know they do exist though. I find myself voting one party at the state level and another at the federal level. Both parties have stances I agree and disagree with. I would love a party that does the same.
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The irony of this post.
If you over-simplify, stereotype and demean people who disagree with you, you're part of the problem.
Honestly if it was that simple, then maybe we should just say no more killing babies and let the hunters shoot their deer and otherwise move forward with the rest of the Democratic party's platform.
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Have you been under a rock the last few years? It's way more than just abortion and guns these days.
Yes but the "both sides" argument is a fallacy.
I live in a red state whose natural environment has been devastated by Republican policies for over a century. What people see here today is a remnant of primordial old-growth wilderness. But they think it's natural and how it's always been. Similarly to the way that austerity drives struggle and suffering for working class families, but they continue voting conservative against their own self-interest. The worse it gets, the more they vote Republican. Like Lucy pulling the football away from Charlie Brown right as he is about to kick it.
Democrats have been pushing for sustainability and a national rollout of renewable energy since at least the 1960s, definitely before the Earth First! movement of the 1980s, and probably all the way back to the strengthening of national parks by Teddy Roosevelt during the Progressive Era around 1900. It's odd to imagine a Republican as an environmentalist today, but there used to be many. That helps us to understand how the parties flipped due to stuff like Nixon's Southern Strategy.
We can blame Democrats for urban sprawl, high state sales tax, red tape/overregulation, basic hypocrisy in not living sustainably at an individual level and subscribing to neoliberalism like Republicans. But the economic and environmental problems we face today are mostly a result of decades of anti-sustainability legislation and subsidies for fossil fuel companies by Republicans. To say otherwise is revisionist history and not the academic view IMHO.
With the 100 year storms hitting the south every 2-10 years now, the environmental bill is coming due. It's all but certain that some number of southern states will flip blue. It will be interesting to see if that improves their infrastructure, or if it's too late.
But I do agree with you about the dysfunction. When the Boomers pass, I wonder if the parties will flip again and introduce a whole new set of wedge issues to argue about incessantly as the world burns.
That's exactly my point though. It's only a fallacy because of your particular view on certain topics. For some people it's guns and abortion, for you it's the environment.
Imagine the world from the point of view of some one that truly believes that abortion is the murder of little children. I really mean it, just for 30 seconds.
We all have these core issues that we hold most dear and assume others must as well. Many people care far more about social issues than the environment or taxation or whatever their 'it' is.
Having only 2 parties forces us to choose the party that best represents our 'it' but to also vote for the myriad of other policies we may disagree with. We very much dislike the other party though because they have the opposite stance on our 'it'.
"It's all but certain that some number of southern states will flip blue" Florida is redder than ever. I encourage you to pause and reflect on the why of that. It's very much not because the voters are stupid, they have other 'its' that are important to them.
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This is the first I've seen data on high demand growth this summer (I live in Texas and try to follow these issues).
> The power grid has seen overall demand grow 7% this summer, after two decades of predictable 1% per year growth, and 10 preliminary demand records since late June. [1]
[1]: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/erc...
What's stopping power companies from ramping up energy production? They know in advance there will be problems. What stopping them from just producing more? I realize there are some peculiarities of the Texas grid, but this is obviously a problem beyond Texas, as California and east coast has blackouts as well. I'm asking about all these cases.
I imagine maybe this requires some additional infrastructure that simply doesn't exist. If so, what's the barrier to building this infrastructure?
Permitting and transmission lines.
There's a queue of companies who want to build power plants in Texas, but can't because the lines aren't there. https://www.texastribune.org/2023/05/25/texas-renewable-ener...
When you're already running at full tilt, how are you going to ramp up energy production? You then need to build more.
Building and connecting takes time. Texas has added several state's worth of energy to the grid in the past few years. The peak hit at the 2021 winter storm was 76GW, far higher than any normal time historically. This summer, just two years later, Texas is going >85GW of power demand every day.
For comparison, New York's projected peak demand is only 32GW for this summer. So Texas' demand grew by an additional 1/3 of New York's entire demand in just 2 years. That's a massive amount of growth!
https://dps.ny.gov/summer-energy-outlook
So essentially its high growth in energy demand? And probably it not making sense financially to overbuild.
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> If so, what's the barrier to building this infrastructure?
Tons of money, and time?
Texas grid is over 100GW, they're saying they have a 7% increase in demand? So figure like 5-10GW?
They just spent $10 billion on 10GW of new power plants, and those take 5-10 years to come online. (And the estimate is it'll overrun to $18 billion)
They're already incentivized to do this because the price varies with demand. Providers that can vary their output (at least some natural gas and coal sources) already do this on a daily basis, which you can see here: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix
The overnight low price is typically $20-$30/MWh. Yesterday during the shortage the price peaked at $5000/MWh, which I suspect might be an upper limit.
I live in Texas and we’ve been dancing on the edge of energy availability for weeks now. If you glance at ERCOT’s public graphs that estimate energy supply and demand, every evening we’re barely eeking by. From what I’ve heard, this should be improving daily as temperatures ease, but I guess not. Surprising that we had an emergency episode in September rather than two weeks ago.
If Texas can’t supply enough energy in the summer, I have no hope for what our future winters will look like.
I feel like TX is doing more to push for energy independence than any other single organization in the country. the grid incompetence, and governments unwillingness to resolve, is the best driver for household battery and solar I can this of.
I don't live in TX, but if I didn't have 1day battery storage, coupled with solar capability to charge that battery to full in a single day, with a generator as backup, every ounce of effort would be going to that.
While that would work well in summer, and this current issue, the outlook isn’t so good for Texas winters. I recently spoke with another Texan who has had solar + batteries for a couple years.
Apparently, in our area, winters are so cloudy that their solar panels (which cover 100% of energy usage in summer) don’t cover but 20% of their usage in the winter.
No reasonable amount of batteries can ward off grid concerns with those inefficiencies.
Most people can’t afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars on an off grid capable battery and solar setup.
isn’t it normal for supply to only barely exceed demand? That’s what’s most efficient.
Out of curiosity, what did those graphs look like to you on previous years?
I didn’t live here in previous years, but I think it’s abnormal that multiple days in a week demand is estimated to be above supply.
And yes, it’s most efficient to keep supply and demand close. But based on this article and our recent trends, it seems like there’s some trouble / concern with unlocking the extra energy needed to supply everyone lately.
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As a Texan, I think whats going on in Texas, perhaps controversially is what happens when you have an over reliance on solar and wind as primary power sources. Even in Texas (where wind is basically ever-present) there are times when the wind does not blow.
I think wind and solar are great, and we should build more, but you also need a sizable amount of thermal generation (preferably nuclear) to provide for base load.
I dont think thermal can be replaced readily with gas turbine, battery, pumped storage, or other forms of rapid spin up equipment.
I have the somewhat controversial opinion that things like bitcoin are useful because they create static demand, and by doing so make the excess generation from wind and solar economical, thereby keeping the spot price in the grid high enough that thermal generation is still cost effective to build and operate - I dont think we should be paying them to shut down, they should just be disconnected wholesale from the grid during periods of ultra high demand as a condition of their interconnection to it.
This big dip here in TFA is probably because of some thermal plant going down unexpectedly.
The other close day this summer was also because of thermal plants supposedly not being able to come online due to extra maintenance.
The real issue in texas is not enough thermal generation capacity - I'd prefer it be nuclear, but right now its gas, and we dont have enough based on the states growth.
> The call came, the group said, as heat drove energy demand up and wind power was forecasted to be low.
Renewable energy is not reliable or stable enough to be as large of a share of the power grid as it already is. ERCOT is running into this first because it’s a smaller grid and has less margin for error, but the other two US grids are going to have the same problem in time.
Currently also predicting more demand than capacity today: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/supplyanddemand
So based on that[1], it looks like the issue is that solar and wind capacity is forecasted to dip right around the time demand peaks? And there's basically no battery storage available (4,835 MW of maximum storage output vs the 61,549 MW maximum combined output for wind+solar)?
[1]: https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards
EV's
This will become a bigger issue for all as more EV's gain adoption.
And with the reluctance to use nuclear, there's not many reliable options for clean energy.
Do you have any supporting evidence for that? becuase i have seen EV's power entire homes when the power is cut, which kind of sounds like the opposite. I have also seen most 'smart' chargers take demand into account when charging up your car.
Massive solar deployment is a great clean energy source to add to the existing plants. However, it isn't a solid baseline source without storage/batteries.
This is where EVs can help if they have V2G aka bidirectional charging capabilities.
Nuclear will take years if not decades to solve the problems but solar can be deployed in months or a year with the right incentives.
EVs might become a large part of the grid's energy storage, smoothing out these conditions of solar/wind shortages.
If ERCOT is paying bitcoin miners to not mine, I don't see why they wouldn't be willing to pay EV owners for some storage capacity and cooperative charge scheduling.
ERCOT pays even home users to use LESS electricity even during non-emergency situations.
It's way cheaper to give incentive pricing to consumers to use less energy, than it is to build an entirely new power plant.
Adding an EV to my garage didn't do any of this. It charges when there's plenty of energy around.
Unpopular opinion (and so strange that a red state like Texas did it this way), but: Texas is far too dependent on wind power, fossil fuel plants (even natural gas!) being shut down at the behest of the federal govt, and definitely not enough nuclear, although those can take quite a few years to come online.
Related thread from today:
Texas paid Bitcoin miner Riot $31.7M to shut down in August
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418866
Wait, so instead of charging their crypto mining customers more, they are paying them not to mine? WTF? You have to love their "free market" energy grid /s
we pay farmers more to not grow something as well. there's a lot of WTactualF moments in where the government spends money.
[dead]
If you look at it like "I contracted to be able to buy 1 GW from you" and now you're paying me to buy that contract back, it makes a bit more sense.
There's a lot of misunderstanding in the comments so far regarding bitcoin mining incentives. I urge you to read this thread describing the split-second load-shedding response time from the POV of one of these miners:
https://twitter.com/ogbtc/status/1699588007664275873
It also goes into the other mechanism by which they make money (being natural sellers of future energy demand contracts during times of high demand). This mechanism is similar to how other commodity markets operate with producers, consumers with steady future demand, and consumers with unpredictable short-term demand.
Our energy grids need to keep an equal demand/production at all times, and on-demand load-shedding is a valuable part of this equation. The bitcoin miners are providing a service to ERCOT and being paid for it. If there were a more "productive" source of on-demand energy usage, then it will replace the bitcoin miners, this is how markets work (of which both energy production/consumption and capitalism in general are).
This is the reality of how the texas energy grid works at present. The bitcoin miners, for lack of a (subjectively) "better" option, are filling the two needs of elastic load-shedding and predictable future demand. The first is very hard to fill, the latter can probably be fulfilled more productively with steady demand from other industries (factories, data centers, other things that run 24h per day).
One more edit: this whole equation changes COMPLETELY if we have the ability to store energy production in times of low demand to be used in future times of high demand (batteries). We don't currently have this at any sort of reasonably useful scale, we need this, and the current "market" everyone is upset about is a bandaid on top of the lack of decent storage options. For the climate folks, the anti-bitcoin folks, whoever disagrees with what I've said here: Fix the storage issue and everything gets magically better. Good luck, it's a very hard problem with very nasty environmental impacts, I'm rooting for you.
Alternatively, a better option: as a human need, maybe energy production shouldn’t _strictly_ follow market incentives and shouldn’t be _solely_ governed by supply/demand dynamics
Totally agree! But this isn't the reality we live in today and you have proposed a potentially better option with no ideas on how to achieve it. What you need to focus on is how we can grow a better grid while achieving prepaid usage levels, guaranteed usage levels, and on-demand response. These factors are what lead to a more efficient, more climate friendly, more better etc etc grid.
Saying they're "providing a service" by turning off in peak times is kind of a ridiculous phrasing. Normal consumers in normal markets don't buy at peak because peak pricing is quite expensive. Flipping the equation to paying people to not buy something and calling it a service is outrageous. It exposes the grid as something that literally cannot work on free market principles. People are right to be outraged.
This just isn't how the grid works. Texas has added more than double the amount of renewable energy than any other state grid in the last two years. These investments introduce variable production and require on-demand response to keep the demand/consumption balance steady. Normal / residential consumers do not have a steady demand, don't prepay power usage, and don't guarantee future power usage. All of these factors are what make industrial demand response valuable and necessary for the modernizing, increasingly-renewable based, power grid. ERCOT isn't perfect, I think there are areas for vast improvement, but I think your comment is a little uninformed as to how the grid currently works and will be working in the future as we increase renewable production.
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Putting the electricity into giant resistors would be a more productive source of on-demand energy usage.
GPUs are pretty much fancy resistors that also happen to do some math.
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According to my Google foo, around 1000 people per day have been moving to Texas in the last three years alone. Put anywhere between a half million to three quarters of a million additional people on the power grid in a three year span and the grid is bound to have issues.
Also, really like how the majority of the comments sound like Reddit /r/politics's far left, adult man child, ignorant insights.
are you implying there’s been zero construction on the grid to increase supply _for three years?_
There's been lots of construction, but growth in demand is 7x higher than previous years. It takes time to build and connect plants.
If only they had interconnect with other states for backup power...
I actually think it’s the only somewhat good thing about Texas’ grid. What better way to ensure Island configuration works than running that mode all the time?
I mean I guess - but there is no getting around that it concentrates risk...
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Before the blockchain hate gets too intense just wanted to remind that Bitcoin is the odd one out using a proof-of-work algorithm. Pretty much every other project uses a security technique that is light on power-consumption.
So Texas almost got close to a blackout in the last 2 years?
Is this newsworthy, are we reporting on things that almost happened?
If you had lived through the last blackout and still lived in Texas, then absolutely yes it’s newsworthy. We want to grade our government accurately. Almost having a collapse again is a bad mark on the test score.
Yes, lets keep news coverage focused only on disasters after they've happened.
Let's keep our heads down in the sand when the cracks are starting to show and when there still might be time to adapt to what's going on before the disaster strikes.
Nothing happened, so nothing to see here. Everything is working perfectly, move along.
... Does something need to be an abject disaster in order to be newsworthy? This is so strange to me as a position.
In case you were asking this in good faith: Yeah, it is, for a buncha reasons. I'll theorycraft a few from my uneducated position:
1) There was a public mass email sent out, but followup wasn't forthcoming, so people might want to know what happened. People often turn to the news for this function.
b) There was grid failure that resulted in deaths because it got too cold out a while back, so people might want to know if it's likely to happen again, once more making the news about the conditions involved relevant, because it wasn't too cold this time.
iii) Some people rely on electricity to stay alive in a very-direct, medical sense, and might be so interested enough in the power grid's disposition to be concerned if someone at ERCOT farts out of turn.
Also, yes, the news routinely reports on things that almost happened. I don't even own cable TV and I know that.
It’s newsworthy if you live there when it’s 108 degrees in a house built such that it will easily reach 95-100 inside with just an hour of AC outage.
Which is basically every new house in Texas.
Regional blackouts are kinda common in Texas. The article briefly mentions the AC frequency doing too can damage the grid. This damage can actually lead to months long power outages for large regions.
Its newsworthy because of its frequency of occurrence.
I think the news is that they paid bitcoin miners to sit idle. The only other choice was to charge them more for power usage.
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and because of the timing. a blackout or grid failure now would be incredibly deadly to vulnerable populations.
It would have had blackouts if it didn't build all those bitcoin mines. The bitcoin mines encouraged power infrastructure development, and they can just be taken offline when high heat causes power demand spikes for air conditioning.
I'm not from Texas so genuinely asking, is there hard proof that anyone specifically invested in power infrastructure because of bitcoin mines in a way they wouldn't have otherwise?
> I'm not from Texas so genuinely asking, is there hard proof that anyone specifically invested in power infrastructure because of bitcoin mines in a way they wouldn't have otherwise?
In theory supply and demand still exists in Texas, and Bitcoin miners do demand a lot of energy. Assuming that energy companies are including Bitcoin miners in their demand projections (I don't see why they wouldn't?) then the default assumption is that just based on the market forces at play, capacity should have been built with Bitcoin miner demand included.
i live in texas and no, there’s not. because it didn’t happen.
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This is the same logic that says bitcoin encouraged green power building but in reality they just absorb the excess power from the cheapest source available so they're essentially offsetting any new power generation by simply consuming more power when it's available. They anchor the rate around what is profitable to mine at so power doesn't get lower unless/until mining becomes less profitable.
Doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations, it seems that a power company would make more money selling wholesale power to the open market in ERCOT than it would mining bitcoin.
The simple fact of the matter is Texas does not have sufficient electrical generation capacity to satiate its demands, especially given the record spate of hot days (it's been daily highs above 100F in Austin for two months). There's no need to add extra sources of demand to encourage new supply.
Still a very roundabout way for the state gov to pay for infra upgrades.
People literally freezing to death amidst billions of dollars of water damage to homes via busted pipes didn't encourage the state to upgrade its infrastructure.
Just a few months ago on HN there was a thread discussing the upcoming summer.
Was surprised just how many 'free-market' advocates came out to say how great things were, how the market has created additional supply, and all this was just lib panic.
They are paying 'crypto-miners' to temporarily stop running? That is absurd. So I could make money just by moving a mining operation to Texas, and wait for a shutdown.
How much failure does it take to realize some regulation is good. It benefits everyone.
The market did create a ton of supply. It added so much supply electric contracts went as low as $0.10/kWh including delivery costs at the start of the summer. It added several state's worth of supply. Its just people demanded even more with 7x more growth in demand than historical.
A map of power outages over the last few years with TX, CA, LA, WA and MI in the lead: https://www.fixr.com/articles/power-outage-solutions
Maine is a headscratcher with HydroQuebec across the border.
That is a pretty misleading presentation, because of the cherry-picked dates and conflating (apparently) capacity-related outages with public safety shutoffs, and for not weighting by population impact.
California has not had any capacity-related problems in the past 2 years, mostly due to the fact that they now have 5.5GW of battery backup capacity that covers the critical period at dusk, when solar generation is headed for zero, during late summer where the days are getting shorter but it is still hot.
> they now have 5.5GW of battery backup capacity that covers the critical period at dusk, when solar generation is headed for zero, during late summer where the days are getting shorter but it is still hot
Am I supposed to interpret "covers critical period at dusk..." as the "hours" part of 5.5GW? Because I'm having trouble grokking what is the actual battery backup capacity described here... Does CA have battery capacity that can last a single evening @ 5.5GW of load?
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MI downtime is a result of cutting back on expensive tree trimming and other upkeep functions. We had a good run of very light storms but we’re back to normal wind and all those tree limbs that should have been taken care of now are adding up the down time.