Good for them! Theoretically that should attract industries that need a lot of electricity and everything balances out cost and demand wise.
So, bitcoin miners
Fuck bitcoin. It should be allocated to desalinisation so less water is pulled from the rivers of the driest continent on Earth. The ecology around waterways is already in the shitter, and global warming is going to 10x that clusterfuck.
That is a good option too. How long does it take to spool up or ramp down desalination? I mentioned Bitcoin mining because it’s super fast to come online or go offline depending on the energy requirements at the moment.
You wouldn’t cover the cost of the miners if you had to shut turn them off and on like that. The worth of their hashing capabilities is nearly always declining as more and better miners come online.
But using the miners to do something else was always an interesting idea, like using them to heat a building. Maybe you could heat a swimming pool with them.
For home usage my thought would be use it as a hot water heater or a dryer for clothes or maybe even make a switchable 500 watt and 1500 watt version and use it as a space heater for those cold winter nights.
Ya, if you have a miner at home, it will reduce your heating bill. You just gotta find a good use for it when it’s not cold outside, so something like supplementing your water heater as you mentioned would work ya.
I think there’s merit in the idea. Someone makes an electric water heater purpose built for this and they build a miner card you can swap in/out as technology improves the the current one becomes obsolete. Uses the miner for primary heat, and when it’s not enough uses regular electricity to make the heat.
See, that would be awesome as hell, because those appliances need heat. And so, mining with it basically subsidizes the heat that I would otherwise just be using anyway. It may not subsidize it completely, but any subsidy is better than no subsidy at all.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, this feels like a good place for Hydrogen power to step in.
One of the oft repeated concerns is that generating hydrogen to power vehicles the takes a lot of energy, which often comes from dirty sources.
One of the oft repeated issues for solar (or wind etc) is that it’s available at certain times and not in and of itself storable or transportable, so excess is lost.
So, take the excess solar energy, produce hydrogen and store for off-peak times or to distribute.
Seems like a win to me.
And this involves only driving in summer when there is excess energy? Or getting through winter by storing enough hydrogen to make the Beirut explosion look like a firecracker in comparison?
That’s funny, but modern solar panel power plants don’t care that it’s winter. The panels rotate and an arid area isn’t getting that much more cloud cover.
The article says the ones it talks about do. Also, rotating panels can’t stop days from being shorter during winter.
I’m not saying it’s not lower. I’m saying it’s not nearly as big of a deal as people say it is.
How else will they be able to continue justify pulling coal out of the ground if they have a robust power grid based on renewables
