RE: New rules on the Texas network would slow crypto mining boom6 Apr 2022 05:11
Herdie.
Why would Ercot reduce cormint from 130mw to 25MW ?
Abbots well known for his truth bombs blamed wind and solar for grid failure w
In an interview with Sean Hannity, Abbott gave an explanation for why his state’s current crisis exposes the flaws in a massive shift toward renewable energy. “This shows how the Green New Deal would be a deadly deal for the United States of America,” Abbott said. He noted that the wind and solar energy that was shut down amid the polar vortex were “collectively more than 10 percent of our power grid,” and when they failed, it resulted in a system-wide collapse. “It just shows that fossil fuel is necessary for the state of Texas as well as other states to make sure we’ll be able to heat our homes in the winter time and cool our homes in the summer time,” Abbott concluded. February 2021
Then feb 2022
Abbott has seized on a different strategy for shoring up the grid: cryptocurrency. After China banned the mining of cryptocurrency, last June, a number of crypto-mining companies established or expanded their presence in Texas. The state’s deregulated electricity market means that Texans pay some of the lowest prices for electricity in the country (at least, when extreme weather doesn’t distort the market), making the state a natural choice for cryptocurrency mining, which essentially converts electricity to money. Crypto-mining facilities in Texas already consume enough electricity to power several cities. By 2023, it is estimated that ercot will account for twenty per cent of the global bitcoin network, and, by the end of that year, the state’s crypto-mining facilities’ power demands may have increased by as much as fivefold. This would seem to be a questionable move for a place with a demonstrably fragile grid. But Abbott has aggressively courted crypto companies, arguing that the energy-hungry industry will make Texas’s grid more resilient by encouraging energy providers to build more capacity. That capacity hasn’t yet arrived. In the meantime, some crypto-mining companies have arrangements with ercot that allow them to benefit from the fragility of the system: when heightened demand sends electricity prices soaring, the miners agree to shut off their servers and get paid for funnelling power back into the grid. Last fall, Abbott met with Texas’s major cryptocurrency companies and asked them to help him get through the winter, according to reporting from Bloomberg.
Texans have good reason for internalizing the idea that state officials aren’t going to look out for our interests. The wait for a home generator is months long. A recent ad for the Ford F-150 Lightning, the electric version of the best-selling pickup, showed a house’s lights ominously flickering during a storm. But the menace doesn’t last long: a family uses the truck as a kind of battery on wheels, plugging it in to re-illuminate the house. The commercial struck me as an invocation of a distinctively Texan dream,
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