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by jmcgeeney 1684 days ago
If you're honestly looking for the best solution to plentiful, on-demand, cheap electricity, energy storage via batteries is a much better solution. Why burn up excess energy from a wind farm, rather than storing it to be reused during peak periods?
1 comments

Batteries are actually terrible at storing large amount of energy for any significant period of time, otherwise this would be the solution everywhere
You don't usually need to store energy for a significant period of time, just until the daily peak. Last I checked, the efficiency for charge + discharge was something like 70%, which, in any case, is much better than the 0% energy savings from using that energy to mine crypto.
However bad batteries are at storing energy long-term, I guarantee that bitcoin mining rigs are worse. It's hard for a battery to do worse than losing 100% of "stored" energy immediately to heat.