Texas paid bitcoin miner more than $31 million to cut energy usage during heat wave
Texas paid bitcoin miner more than $31 million to cut energy usage during heat wave
To ease load on aging grid, state program offers energy credits to bitcoin miners to curtail their power consumption.
So…move to Texas and start mining like crazy to get a better payday than what the crypto will be worth. Got it.
Die when you realize your AC exploded and it's actually cooler in your mining room than it is outside.
I don't think you actually have to gamble on crypto to pull this scam. Just say you are, and consume lots of power and get paid to lower consumption.
If this is their approach to public policy I have to wonder whether Texas is hoarding all the good drugs for themselves.
If by "hoarding all the good drugs" you mean keeping out weed in favor of so, so many opiods, then yes. Apparently SW Missouri is a reasonable driving distance for some Texans to get some weed. An old Texan man in a big truck is often about to spend hundreds of dollars on weed. It's for their short sojourn in Missouri, they assure me.
Who said mining wasn’t profitable!?
Holy fuck, if Texans could only read, they would be so pissed.
I can't quite see it, but I'm really guessing there's some sort of money laundering angle here.
It's not really laundering because the income was legal. It's more like a game of Russian roulette blackmail to allow a negotiable tax evasion rate.
There are a lot of figures left out of the article, but it sounds like a preemptive bailout to handle a company fully prepared to cause the rolling blackouts that would also damage themselves. Plus those credits can most likely be sold and bought like any other commodity, only a bit less regulated. Given a few years of climate change those credits will be extremely valuable. Then again, I'm just a speculative jerk on the worldwide web with an opinion. I could be wrong.
He is the MessiahThen again, I’m just a speculative jerk on the worldwide web with an opinion. I could be wrong.
Company should be straight bankrupt already with its posted financials.
Riot, which is publicly traded, in 2022 reported a loss of more than $500 million on revenue of $259.2 million. In its most recent quarter, it had a loss of roughly $27 million on revenue of $76.7 million.
Money laundering
In its most recent quarter, it had a loss of roughly $27 million
Not anymore, apparently. I'm sure the Texas taxpayers are grateful.
And they will bounce back when Btc will rise
Keep dreaming.
If they stopped killing their kids down there for five minutes they can figure out how awful this is and get their grid reconnected.
I think that's their point. Instead of weaponising "woke" and fighting culture wars, they could get their grid to code and connect it.
Increasing the price and giving people energy rebates would have worked, miners only run the machines because the BTC is worth more than the electricity + maintenance + equipment
Except the company in question is losing hundreds of millions a year. The energy credit is likely more than they would have made themselves.
Outside Houston there are homes on legacy cotton farmland, where the owners are paid to not grow cotton on their lawns.
What's wrong with cotton?
nothing, if you don't want to be paid!
a long time ago, the government paid farmers to keep fields fallow, to keep down production and keep prices up. you know... price fixing, like jesus intended when he invented capitalism. these subsidies are still around, because the only thing republicans hate worse then government spending is farmers not voting for them, so you can apply for, and get, subsidies on the land in now subdivisions, and the government will give you a check for not growing cotton on your lawn.
A lot of people don't know how industrial scale power contracts work.
Your pissant $150 light bill isn't worth wiping their corporate asses with. If you are without power for a week they don't care. You can't cancel your subscription, you just have to choke on it.
But factories? They buy hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of power. They use an order of magnitude more electricity than your house. In fact, during a rolling black out they could keep every home in the city powered by shutting off just one factory. The problem is corporations have contracts that actually charge the power company by the hour if they lose power. my company charges over a million dollars an hour.
So buying some mine out of his contract for a little while is not unheard of. Tesla is on that grid so I promise it cost less to shut the miner off than to drop Tesla for a day.
For future reference, an order of magnitude is 10x.
Maybe user was referring to an Imperial order of magnitude 🤣
Interesting.
It can vary depending on context. It can mean another digit, but isn't always in base 10.
Isn't this the point of capitalism? Is there a single industry out there that wouldn't collapse without the welfare it receives from Uncle Sam?
Anything primarily on the black market.
Imagine if Texas didn't hate it's residents enough that they allowed their state electricity grid finally connect to other states utility grids so this wasn't a problem and it reduced prices for the people in Texas (and even prevented deaths from recent strains during extreme weather)!
It's better to let people suffer than to harm that Lone-Star-Don't-Mess-With-Texas" pride.
It takes a real MANS man to let people die for the sake of your ego.
This is the state whose Lieutenant Governor said grandparents aren't afraid to die for the economy.
We shouldn't be surprised.
So fucking ridiculous.
By the way, Texas has a huge “rainy day” fund they haven’t spent from in years. Any sane administration would be pouring some of that into upgrading the grid.
And miss out on all that sweet rate spike during high demand periods?? Do you really think keeping a few people from baking/freezing to death is worth giving that up???
The article all but says just that. They made $10mill more than a month of mining. Not to mention all the costs they didn’t incur by not mining.
subsidizing that stupid bullshit, but i'll bet they hate free school lunches because that's too much kindness for the kids
Honestly, why allow them to mine on the grid at all until it is upgraded? It’s just a big wasteful use of energy that uses public resources but doesn’t benefit the public at all. It just prints money for the guys doing it.
Also, $31 million could go towards better infrastructure that could allow this in the future.
Logic has no power here! —- said in Gandalf’s voice.
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).
Fixing the power grid works be socialism or something...
“Mah freedoms!”
Because they are buying the power, which pays for grid upgrades. The grid won't be improved without demand, and miners provide a flexible, profitable demand for power.
ERCOT's incentives are a bit off, though. They should be offering power to miners at very low rates when they have excess supply available, then jacking up the rates to miners well beyond the point of profitability when they don't have it. Ideally, they would convince the miners to install their own solar and wind generation (and maybe pumped storage as well) and pay them more than they would earn mining to backfeed the grid during power shortages.
Paying miners not to use power is just fucking stupid.
It probably falls under a general policy where they compensate big industrial users if they shut down to save the grid, think like a factory shutting down for the day. It would make sense in those instances, but for crypto mining it's just wasteful.
Was in the thread yesterday saying the same thing. What you describe is exactly what TVA does in essence.
Texas has a 'problem' that prevents them from being able to incentivize this well. At least from what I overheard during my stint at a mine. Texas's big draw are all of the abandoned oil wells. You can simply go purchase a plot of land with a capped well, uncap it and install a Natural Gas generator that captures and burns the NG often released when drilling for oil. This gives you a one time fee for the generator costs and then after that you are in the clear with 'free' (relatively, minus initial costs) energy. This isn't exclusive to Texas, but obviously it can be done at a higher rate in the state compared to others.
Agreed. This is a good solution for the wasteful energy usage of the miners. I don’t see how they arrived at paying them not to use the grid. Does literally any private citizen get paid not to use large amounts of electricity?
Because it’s Texas land of the free.
Individuals can do whatever they want and the costs are set appropriately. Mining bitcoin is more profitable than the cost of electricity. They can either jack the prices up for everyone, or pay miners not to mine. It’s cheaper to pay.
Is it cheaper to ban mining or improve infrastructure? Sure, but there is no societal good, only individual. Banning mining would be an “infringement on the right to make money”.
Texas.
Women might have something to say about "the rights of the individual" in Texas...
There is absolutely no reason why anyone should be allowed to waste energy on that pyramid scheme shit in the first place.
Bitcoin is not a pyramid scheme because nobody controls bitcoin.
FIAT is closer to a pyramid scheme than bitcoin. Do I like bitcoin? No, I prefer monero when it comes to crypto transactions because it actually serves a purpose, but it is the truth.
Capitalism. Socialism would allocate energy and eliminate BTC mining. Social Democrats would give people energy allowance for home use and increase the price by taking it. Pure capitalists say it's good.
All your downvotes are for using the words pyramid scheme. It's a lot of not great things, for sure, but it's not a pyramid scheme.
Because its Texas: the state run by idiots that refuse to connect to the rest of the american grid because if they did, theyd have to actually get everything to code eventually.
They also built much of the solar in one region instead of diversifying. So even when other places are under fire-weather watch from high winds, we can have low wind energy because of low winds where they're built...
So capitalism?
Because normally they make a small profit on the miners. They just didn't expect prices to shoot up.
I am sure they will change their contracts to have contingency clauses for the future.
Err yew insineratin the free merkert is wrong?