5 ms·
From what I understand a lot of power stations produce excess electricity at low demand periods because it’s too costly to completely shut a generator down. So
by knolan 9y ago
From what I understand a lot of power stations produce excess electricity at low demand periods because it’s too costly to completely shut a generator down. So they dump that excess into huge resistor banks. Why not use it to mine crypto currency?
- visarga 9y agoEvery power station needs a bitcoin power sink to recoup their losses.
- cryptodogemoon 9y agoA battery system would be more useful and less wasteful.
- stale2002 9y agoBatteries are extremely expensive, on a per Kwh basis. There aren't enough batteries in the world to recoup any significant chunk of this lost/free/extra energy. Power plants will sometimes even pay people money to accept the electricity, because too much of it has the possibility of damaging something.
- cryptodogemoon 9y agoThrowing computational power at a PoW system for hash collisions is significantly more wasteful than simply reducing the cost of electricity itself or depositing the energy into a storage system for use at later in demand times. If free energy needed to be expelled and couldn't be stored for some weird reason, it could be used to grind wheat, purify water, or run scientific computing to contribute to curing diseases rather than attempt to acquire speculative database tokens.
- stale2002 9y agoTell that to the power plants who ALREADY waste this "free" electricity, by destroying it through putting into giant resistor banks. This is not "some weird reason". Thus is how the current power grid works in many locations. If your theory was correct, then negative energy rates wouldn't even exist right now. But they do.
- philwelch 9y agoAt a very large scale, pumping water uphill is a type of battery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
- PeterisP 9y agoYes, but the capacity of those stations is already used (for managing daily fluctuations) and there's not that much opportunity to build more, they require very specific conditions, are costly, and have a big effect on the environment. As solar and wind grows, we will use more pumped hydro, but there won't be / can't be e.g. a tripling of it.
- stale2002 9y agoThat's actually literally what people do! Specifically, miners in China are often located right next to hydropower plants and buy energy from them when it is cheap. This is because you can't exactly say that shut off a river, because it rained too much yesterday, and is producing too much power.
- philwelch 9y agoBut you can store hydroelectric energy quite easily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
- stale2002 9y agoNot everyone has giant dams and space lying around to create literal lakes of water to store energy. Pumped water isn't a great solution as evidenced by the fact that it has been around for a while and people don't use it right now.
- martin1975 9y agoresistors store electricity? did you mean battery banks?
- knolan 9y agoThey dissipate it into the environment as heat iirc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_bank https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_bank So instead of a resistor use old CPUs and GPU and mine.