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The incentives to use renewables are there... where the costs of fossil sources are high, and where the energy consuming process will be reliably profitable lon
by emn13 5y ago
The incentives to use renewables are there... where the costs of fossil sources are high, and where the energy consuming process will be reliably profitable long enough to pay for all those renewable energy sources.
That last bit makes me doubt this would push renewables - who trusts that mining will remain profitable for years or even a decade? In other words, it may well incentivize energy sources with low down-payment costs.
Also: all those GPUs are expensive; is a miner really going to slow down mining significantly just because it's dark or no longer windy? Or will they prefer constant power, given the fact that GPU's will become obsolete much more quickly than the power source, and thus there's pressure to recoup that investment as quickly as possible, I'd guess... thus incentivizing baseload power, not unreliable but cheap power - conceivably, anyhow?
- kragen 5y agoThe high bit here is that coin mining is not 1 TW; it's 0.012 TW, so the overall effect is almost insignificant. But it's still interesting to know which direction the incentives run. The cost of fossil-fuel electricity generation is about half capex and half opex (including fuel), and in much of the world, solar is now cheaper than either fossil-fuel capex or fossil-fuel opex. A large part of capex is machinery, much of which is so costly that shipping costs are insignificant, so the costs are the same anywhere in the world. Bitcoin isn't mined with GPUs, but your comments about intermittency and capital costs apply a fortiori to ASIC mining.