Comment by rexpop
2 years ago
> The agency also counts on bitcoin miners to soak up excess power when there’s too much supply, keeping prices in check.
And how does the Texas public benefit from this? Is "to soak up excess power" really that valuable?
Power generation comes in two classes, baseline and peaker. Baseline units are on 24/7. They are typically very efficient, but can take days or weeks to start. Peakers can turn on in minutes of notice and are usually better at following demand.
Power demand follows daily sinusoidal cycles. By having an economical consumer of electricity that can choose operation times, you can have them use power at night in order to flatten your sinusoidal demand, thus allowing a higher percentage of efficient baseline units to run instead of peakers.
Why don't they just pump water up hill at night? That would be a much better use of the electricity.
There are already many energy storage systems in place and many more being installed even now. The problem is that energy storage and recovery is a hard problem. Anyone who solves it will be rich overnight.
Texas is like Germany. No hills (unless you count the waste disposal hills, where you cannot pump up water)
2 replies →
AIUI, turning on a dormant power plant is an expensive process, but utilities need to be careful to balance the amount of power they put into the network is close to the amount of power being consumed or "bad things will happen™"
If the power draw is fluctuating around a level where one more power plant needs to be on during the high demand, but is is low enough during low demand for it to be dangerous to keep the plant running, it can be cheaper to just "soak up the extra" than to cycle the whole plant on and off.
> it can be cheaper to just "soak up the extra" than to cycle the whole plant on and off.
hence why nat gas peakers are so valuable.
[flagged]
5 replies →
Frankly? Yes soaking up power is difficult, you need loads of hardware. Put too much power into something and it blows up.
Unless you want to invest vast sums in energy storage then this is quite an efficient option.
It's a pretty standard option in contracts for industrial sized consumers of electricity anywhere in the world.
Yes, very
The soaker being a shitcoin farm however does leave a sour taste in peoples mouths