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by Aunche
972 days ago
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Coal generation is typically used for base loads, while gas generation is typically used for peakers. Intuitively, you can think of it like starting or stopping a charcoal vs gas grill. The coals are much more difficult to light, and they stay hot for a long time. > Quite the contrary, the existence of cryptocurrency to mine acts as a 'productive' sink for power produced in excess of grid baselines By that logic, any use of electricity is a sink for power, which is ridiculous logic. If you spend millions of dollars in mining equipment, you're not just going to let it sit idle for the 22 hours a day when there isn't any excess electricity. You're going to mine whenever it's profitable. Bitcoin users also need miners to clear transactions and provide security against 51% attacks. |
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It isn't though. If you're using electricity for heat in the winter and generation is low for a few contiguous days, you can't just turn off everybody's heat. They'd freeze. But you could certainly stop mining Bitcoin for a week out of the year if the cost of electricity that week was high enough to make it unprofitable.
The problem with renewables isn't that they only generate power a small fraction of the time. It's that they generate power most of the time, but most of the time doesn't work for things that need power all of the time. So having things that can consume power most of the time, and thereby fund that amount of generating equipment, allows that consumption to be turned off so that extra generating equipment can service the things that need power all of the time when there is low generation supply.
You can't fully solve this problem with cryptocurrency, but it's because there isn't enough cryptocurrency -- cryptocurrency mining would have to be on the order of half of the power grid on a typical day, which is not going to happen. But it's a thing that can help rather than hurt to the extent that it exists.
The real problem is that we don't price carbon, so then people mine Bitcoin by burning coal. But they also run lights and computers and elevators by burning coal, which is just as bad and has the same solution.