this post was submitted on 19 May 2024
723 points (98.4% liked)

Technology

59105 readers
3183 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Texas has also become a hotbed for bitcoin mining, adding to electricity demand, as the state’s deregulated power market and abundance of cheap natural gas became attractive to the energy-intensive sector.

Hmm.

That actually might make a lot of sense.

So, if Texas has inexpensive electricity most of the time, but also has occasional high price spikes...bitcoin mining is something where you do not need power now. Sure, you're losing money on your hardware and space if it's not running, but my guess is that bitcoin miners probably can do just fine shutting their systems down when prices rise above a certain point. That would tend to smooth out electricity prices.

I'd been trying to think of electricity users that could defer usage and use a lot of electricity, which are something that you want if you have wildly-varying demand and want to smooth it out, and I suppose that coin mining is actually probably a pretty good example.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

There is a lot of work happening in thermal mass storage for industrial heat demand (currently most industrial processes use Natural Gas to supply heat) .

Almost all Data Centre activity could be priced relative to electricity price allowing dynamic scaling.