Comment by jcranmer
2 years ago
> 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.
Reactive power is by definition unused.
A constant stream of demand that does not fluctuate and can be turned off at a moment's notice without any dire consequences, that's bad at base load? How so?
These heat waves and extreme cold events are purportedly unprecedented, due to climate change. Should we be surprised when electricity infrastructure designed for normal times gets strained? I've been in countries with rolling power outages, I wouldn't call the Texas grid badly engineered. Considering it's a standalone grid I'd say it's got to be fantastically engineered to have the uptime that it has, I don't think the UK even has such a resilient system.
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