[andrewheekin]

This article completely glosses over the hardest problem in the power industry - grid transmission constraints. What's a transmission constraint? Well, eventually the electrical resistance on high voltage power lines reaches a maximum threshold at which no more power can flow through the line, shoutout Ohm's Law :)

I work in financial power derivatives, and there are entire trading desks devoted to "congestion trading" - ie the financial right to transmit power between grid locations with inherent transmission congestion. From the EIA map of mining operations, crypto mining tends to take place in remote areas where electricity is plentiful but hard to deliver to major load zones (cities) due to grid transmission constraints. On the whole, most crypto mining operations choose to operate in regions where the price of electricity is cheap (remote locations). Paradoxically, these operations running during off-peak times contributes to grid stability by smoothing the load curve and preventing expensive curtailment of alternative generation resources (think along the lines of a wind turbine needing to shut down on a windy day bc it's generating more power than the grid can consume)

[ninepoints]

I'm very familiar with congestion trading and was in that industry at one point, but cmon, this is a bad crypto talking point. It's already quite apparent that bitcoin mines actually destabilize grids just as much while driving up electricity prices for local consumers far more than any positive net effect from an energy perspective.