> here in Texas we have to pay miners not to burn electricity
It seems like lunacy when you put it that way.
But I'd rather pay crypto miners to shed load during peak times rather than suffer blackouts at hospitals, chemical plants and water treatment facilities.
Grid stability isn't a joke, and sometimes the least-bad option is still bad. Until we have better storage solutions, flexible demand is a necessary evil.
Maybe paying miners not to mine is a lesser evil than paying even more to spin up filthy coal peaker plants and still have rotating outages.
He's also missing that this extra load is driving base demand, which is a big driver of increased capacity installation. In some sense paying crypto miners (and factories, and increasingly amalgamated groups of home owners using smart thermostats to increase the set point 10-15 degrees higher, etc.) is the best solution until storage becomes viable. They are flattening the demand curve across the year when they drop off at high demand times and are there for the rest of the time, and that's actually pretty useful.
Yes, this tax proposal seems to presume that the mining being done is a value-adding operation. However, an adversary desiring to undermine the electrical grid could just set up servers sending back cryptographic proof that they executed some useless inner loop. Who even knows with all the various crypto-coins now.
It seems like lunacy when you put it that way.
But I'd rather pay crypto miners to shed load during peak times rather than suffer blackouts at hospitals, chemical plants and water treatment facilities.
Grid stability isn't a joke, and sometimes the least-bad option is still bad. Until we have better storage solutions, flexible demand is a necessary evil.
Maybe paying miners not to mine is a lesser evil than paying even more to spin up filthy coal peaker plants and still have rotating outages.