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21 sats \ 2 replies \ @Cje95 28 Aug \ on: Texas Miners make 4x the money from curtailing electricity as from Mining bitcoin_Mining
Not sure if you are from Texas or not and I would have to lean towards you aren't due to the title. When the freeze of 2021 happened and the grid almost failed one of the critical issues that was discovered was that Texas needed to increase its baseload power supply. There are not a lot of quick and effective ways to do this except for BTC mining hence Texas courted BTC miners because the state has the power but it did not have the demand to make a ton of the power plants worth running all the time and turning them on/off properly takes a lot of time.
A common thing that people have said is well just build data centers but because of how this energy credit program works it isn't possible because data centers cannot be flipped on and off without damaging the chips. BTC mining was always going to be a temporary solution to the grid issue at hand.
Now going back to this article I have to laugh at this author's sad attempt to connect events with BTC mining. Hurricane Beryl is the first example used of the grid situation in Texas but guess what.... BTC miners didn't factor in at all because when trees fall onto power lines and cut the lines there just straight up is no power. Centerpoint was months and months behind on tree maintenance and BAM did it show.
With the argument of the ties to China... the big miners in Texas arent Chinese companies the are American companies a lot of the Chinese companies went to Kazakstan before moving on to other Southeast, Russian, and literally back to China locations.
Biggest Critique
These numbers are from a year ago. August 2023 for what it is worth. Here are the numbers for 2023 as a whole taken Jan 4, 2024
Now when we factor in that Bitcoin has risen considerably this year to $60k those 6,626 BTC are worth $397,560 million ($397,560,000.00) which flips even the updated data on its head.
To sum everything up... This was a hit piece that uses old data and doesn't tell the full story. Rockdale where this article is written was a dying city after the steel mills closed and Riot is now its biggest employer. Revenue from the property taxes that they pay contributes a significant share of the money the school district gets. Oh and they have partnered with Texas State University to create a pathway for students to learn about serves/miners and pave the pathway to work for the company or others.
Regarding the freeze of 2021, the culprit was ERCOT? Baseload power supply shortage was caused by wind energy sources freezing?
Very informative comment! Thanks for sharing knowledge! Knowledge is power
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I think there are some dueling issues that hit and while ERCOT I do not believe was even in charge at the time of some things people went after them because they were the overarching head.
Previously, ERCOT/Texas had been warned that they needed to winterize the grid for below-freezing temps. I would estimate most if not all of that wasn't done. There were some places in the panhandle that did to an extent but it turned out not to be enough.
The baseload power is the amount of power that is consistently on the grid and so when there are surges or plummets grid operators have to scramble to either turn things on or turn them off. At the time the freeze set a crazy high new record demand which baseload wasn't close to even reaching. BTC miners because they can be flipped on and off rather quickly help adjust for this dramatic change since they are such a huge power draw.
I want to say there were a handful of pretty large plants that were idled for maintenance without getting approval from ERCOT and that was a huge issue that ERCOT couldn't manage because they were not told.... Natural gas plants froze up because there is a section of pipe that goes roughly out of the ground and into the wall of the building.... these were bare pipes and warming them up isn't exactly simple cause if it gets to hot ya blow yourself up so it was a nightmare situation.
No one expected not only the state to suffer widespread freezing (the Rio Valley was in the teens... that's right by Mexico) to the Panhandle being under 0 it was significant. The wind turbines though were the wildest thing since it was the first time that high humidity (cause ya know its Texas) and below freezing temps clashed and broke even the winterized turbines. Those that didn't break were because essentially shut down.
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