To ease load on aging grid, state program offers energy credits to bitcoin miners to curtail their power consumption.

    • WalrusDragonOnABike
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      71 year ago

      Sure, but I don’t know how much that would matter. In the short-term, batteries might be a viable solution, but $31million would get you about a ~15MW storage system from my understanding, which is about 1 order of magnitude too small to be more than a rounding error and 2 orders of magnitude off from being a fix. Also, electric companies profit off of cryptominers (which theoretically could be used to improve the grid) and ERCOT sees them as a flexible demand that can be turned off in emergencies (at the cost of money).

        • WalrusDragonOnABike
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          21 year ago

          That’s 15MW for 4 hours. Typical period of tight conditions is probably more like 1 hour, so 4 hour capacity is overkill for what Texas has been going though this summer). You could get more capacity for a 2 hour period. I think Texas peak power demand was about 100GW (I think that excludes some parts of Texas that aren’t part of the Texas grid at the East and West ends)