Comment by anonporridge
2 years ago
If there is no buyer for excess solar/wind electricity, then it must curtail and earn less income.
Less income means it takes longer to pay off initial capital costs and generate return.
Slower investment return from solar and wind deployments means expansion of them will take longer.
If wind and solar takes longer to roll out at full scale for financial reasons, then our goals towards fossil fuel reductions takes longer.
Therefore, if you can find a buyer who will suck up any excess solar and wind and pay them, we eliminate fossil fuels quicker.
> If there is no buyer for excess solar/wind electricity, then it must curtail and earn less income.
Solar and wind have the lowest marginal costs of production, which means they'll win out on the wholesale power markets. Furthermore, Texas is a state with increasing population growth and increasing energy needs (hotter planet means more A/C, after all), and has regularly been setting all-time highs on daily energy consumption. So there'll always be a buyer for the excess electricity.
You should read about base load energy production to understand what's going on here.
Look, this is Texas. It's not about base load energy production. This is a system that--several times this past year--is running at demand around 100% of supply capacity. That shouldn't happen; it's just bad industrial engineering.
The cryptocurrency mines aren't adding base load here. It's adding more load on a system that's already taxed to its limits, and justifying it as a good thing because "oh, we can get paid to turn it off if there's too much demand." People should be yelling at ERCOT for being an incompetent regulator that's letting the grid get away with too little supply (and that's what this article is sort of doing, except its anger is directed towards cryptocurrency mines, not ERCOT, so it's somewhat misplaced).
And, for what it's worth, cryptocurrency is kind of bad at base load. It's not using any reactive power.
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It also pushes the market rate below the marginal cost for thermal generation.
remember, everyone: markets are the most efficient way to allocate resources :)