[tsimionescu]

> Where once any increase in consumption was considered harmful due to its reliance on fossil fuels, the rise of renewables introduces scenarios where the marginal environmental cost of electricity can be beneficial if the demand is flexible.

This is a major flawed assumption. Even in a 100% renewable world, every extra watt consumed carries an environmental cost. It is of course less than when burning fossil fuels, but it's still there, and not necessarily even that small.

> The ability of Bitcoin mining to consume excess renewable energy when it's available (and potentially at low or negative prices) could improve the financial viability of renewable energy projects by increasing the floor price these new projects can sell electricity at.

The world has not run out of useful things to do with energy yet, so this is already a bizarre claim. But even ignoring the uselessness of Bitcoin for a moment, this clearly incentivizes the wrong kind of renewable development. If you need to turn your power to Bitcoin to be profitable, that means you can't afford to store this power even as the technology to do that improves. And if you can't store the power, then you can't be part of a fully renewable grid, so you're essentially building the wrong thing and it's better to leave the resources alone to be used in other projects that can actually be self sustaining.