To ease load on aging grid, state program offers energy credits to bitcoin miners to curtail their power consumption.

To ease load on aging grid, state program offers energy credits to bitcoin miners to curtail their power consumption.

  • @[email protected]
    72•10 months ago

    Also, $31 million could go towards better infrastructure that could allow this in the future.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike
      7•10 months ago

      Sure, but I don’t know how much that would matter. In the short-term, batteries might be a viable solution, but $31million would get you about a ~15MW storage system from my understanding, which is about 1 order of magnitude too small to be more than a rounding error and 2 orders of magnitude off from being a fix. Also, electric companies profit off of cryptominers (which theoretically could be used to improve the grid) and ERCOT sees them as a flexible demand that can be turned off in emergencies (at the cost of money).

      • @Bobert
        2•10 months ago

        Site I worked at was on the company’s smaller end and we consumed around 10MW an hour.

        • WalrusDragonOnABike
          2•10 months ago

          That’s 15MW for 4 hours. Typical period of tight conditions is probably more like 1 hour, so 4 hour capacity is overkill for what Texas has been going though this summer). You could get more capacity for a 2 hour period. I think Texas peak power demand was about 100GW (I think that excludes some parts of Texas that aren’t part of the Texas grid at the East and West ends)