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Batteries and Renewables Are Saving Texas During the Heat Wave
- ftxbro 3y agobitcoin is saving it, they installed so many subsidized bitcoin mines there and now they can use that power infrastructure during the heat wave
- PlunderBunny 3y agoWas that sarcasm? I can’t tell any more.
- avnigo 3y agoHere's a short documentary film on bitcoin mining in Texas and Oklahoma, and its effects on the electrical grid and the communities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKUBpaXNH_g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKUBpaXNH_g
- sacnoradhq 3y agoThe Fed should deploy market-making strats to bankrupt major crypto and shun exchanges industry-wide. Blockchain ledger immutability, smart contracts, and distributed transactions are good, but tying crypto to massive CPU use is expensive, wasteful, and climate-damaging. A friend mines several non-PoW cryptos at home here in TX since there's no money in GPU mining anymore. Also, Helium, if that counts but it's really "Airbnb for LoRa".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- PaywallBuster 3y agoTexas is not redneck republican southern state - Texas is the "energy capital" of (USA/World?) - Texas have its own grid disconnected from West/East grids https://www.houston.org/why-houston/industries/energy https://www.houston.org/why-houston/industries/energy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Texas Someone more knowledgeable feel free to chip in with more data points
- pjc50 3y ago> is not redneck republican southern state It very much is on all those axes, even if it does have some hightech/liberal urban centres. In re: other points, much of the "energy capital" is due to its long history of oil and gas extraction, and the disconnected grid is arguably a bug rather than a feature. Even if they don't want to maintain grid sync, a HVDC link east and/or west would be of significant benefit to cost and stability.
- Qwertious 3y agoTexas is a large state, which makes these statistics weird - the cliched example for large states is that California has more republicans than most red states. The disconnected grid is to avoid any federal regulation (because a connection across state lines would obviously count as "interstate commerce"), which seems to have real value given the current clusterfuck of a political environment.
- pjc50 3y ago> avoid any federal regulation (because a connection across state lines would obviously count as "interstate commerce"), which seems to have real value given the current clusterfuck of a political environment. Could you explain the practical advantages of this and which federal regulations the state is better off without? What particular details of federal energy regulation are bad? (Besides, given Wickard vs Fillmore I'm not convinced that disconnection would be enough to avoid incurring commerce clause regulation given a sufficiently motivated supreme court)
- nomel 3y agoFor reference, I pay over 65c/kw hour in the heat of the day, in California. It’s going up significantly shortly. Their power is significantly cheaper. I naively assume this is a practical advantage.
- thinkcontext 3y agoEven Ted Cruz had to back down on the Texas swagger about ERCOT saving the state from communistic FERC after hundreds froze to death. Care to explain how you are immune from this reflection?
- InsomniacL 3y ago"White male uses thermal imaging camera to perform ..."
- pjc50 3y agoYeah, that looks weird. I wonder if that's an AI output.
- real_human 3y agoTF, May be AI, but always felt weird to see 'race' field in those American forms
- Zealotux 3y agoIt’s a stock image, the author most likely just used the description from the provider, which mentioned the race and gender for easier search.
- daneel_w 3y agoThat caught my eye as well. Not the usual "a man" or "a worker/technician". Perhaps the main description of the caption is directly copied from Getty.
- pjc50 3y agoI wonder how many of those batteries are islanding-capable systems installed when people got cut off or hugely overcharged in the previous (winter) power crisis?
- ragestorm 3y agoA lot. Neighbors round here all got solar panels or a generator hookup installed. Bidens infrastructure extended the solar credits by a decade making it even more appealing.
- dkobia 3y agoAccording to a report by the Energy Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s electric grid manager, crypto mining “consumed” more than 3,300 Gigawatt/hours of Texas grid energy in 2022, more than double the amount used 2021. Riot Platforms’ mine in Rockdale, Texas, uses about the same amount of electricity as the nearest 300,000 homes, making it the most power-intensive Bitcoin mining operation in America.[1] [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/09/business/bitcoin-mining-electricity-pollution.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/09/business/bitcoin-mining-e...
- misja111 3y agoAt least we can take comfort in the fact that this computing power was used to support a platform popular with speculators, money launders, drug traders and ransom ware exploiters.
- kevinak 3y agoThat article is full of misinformation and has been debunked multiple times. Even the hero image is doctored to make it look smoggy and polluted. [0] Bitcoin mining is great for the Texas grid. Miners end up buying cheap excess energy and when there is a shortage they just turn off their miners, keeping the price from going haywire. Here's the CEO of Ercot explaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKnRfDeFgr0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKnRfDeFgr0 [0]: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/did-the-new-york-times-manipulate-bitcoin-mine-footage https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/did-the-new-york-times-m...
- hotpotamus 3y agoI have a buddy who lives in rural south Texas who saw a couple containers with big fans on the side get dropped off near his town, connect power and set up some sort of liquid cooling lines to a pool. He assumed it was crypto mining, which was the only thing that made much sense to me as well. Interesting to see his on the ground observations as part of the larger story.
- nocoiner 3y agoAs a Texas resident, I’m glad that batteries and renewables are bailing us out. Once a week or so, my utility (actually, a middleman wholesaler of power that they purchase from the actual generators, due to our deregulated electrical market structure) sends an email asking us to please limit consumption during the following day due to anticipated extraordinary demand. My response is “get bent” - ERCOT has literally one job - grid stability - and the legislature had no business trying to attract crypto miners. So I’ll happily take advantage of the fixed priced electrical contract I entered into (nine cents a kilowatt hour) and keep my AC where I damn well please. 99% of time, it is literally my pleasure to act in pro-social ways according to the greater good, but I see no reason whatsoever why I personally should bail out the grid and state leadership from their political decisions. I’ve spent plenty of time sitting in the cold or hot dark due to their mismanagement (probably an aggregate of about 10 days without power in the last three years), so when (if?) they’re capable of attending to the population as a whole rather than special interests, I’ll happy do my part. Until then, I’m simply going to continue to abide by the “every man for himself” ethos they’ve adopted.
- bigyikes 3y agoI live in Texas and got a “smart” thermostat recently. I was delighted to find that my energy company is offering a $25/year credit for having one. It’s not much, but it’s nice to have. …or so I thought. It turns out that accepting this $25/yr alllows the grid to remotely control my thermostat. I was sweating in my living room, wondering why it felt so hot. Apparently the grid was facing peak load, so they raised my thermostat temperature by 2 degrees! Thankfully there is a manual override when this happens, but I have to call my energy company to disable this “feature” completely. I’m sorry, you cannot pay me $25/yr to sweat on my sofa.
- hef19898 3y agoAlso, I am fairly sure, they got the right to collect a ton of usage and personal data for those 25 bucks.
- nocoiner 3y agoI have ecobee thermostats that I’m generally happy with - HomeKit integration, seemingly comprehensive privacy controls, overall well designed and functional - but they have all kinds of dark patterns designed to force you into these programs. And you really have to go in to a bunch of different settings to excise the utility’s ability to take over your thermostat if you’ve happened to opt in. I think demand reduction is generally a great idea, but considering what that two degree increase is saving your utility, there really ought to be a 50/50 split of savings than kicking back a pittance of $25 a year.
- tootallgavin 3y agohttps://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/fuelmix weird. Currently, natural gas is 62.4% of the fuel mix
- hoppery 3y agoIt’s normal, the sun goes down quite regularly.
- gruez 3y agoBut if you look at previous day's graphs, you see that solar tops out at 20%, whereas natural gas never drops below 50%.
- hoppery 3y agoNatural gas generation never drops below ~40% period in this state, the novelty here is its losses from heat were covered to the tune of 35% of the mix last Tuesday. PV generation maxes out at ~12GW, the bulk of our renewable energy comes from wind but it isn’t blowing this week ergo outsized natgas generation before the sun is up.
- pjc50 3y agoAmazing - as a Brit I get a security incident blocked warning, which is presumably some sort of halfassed GDPR worry.
- brycewray 3y agohttps://archive.fo/mk28t https://archive.fo/mk28t
- perrygeo 3y agoJust as Natural Gas and Coal are "saving" Texas when it's not sunny and windy. A robust power grid can benefit from a diversity of sources and that's exactly what ERCOT has been doing - investing in engineering to make a better utility, not some moral battle between renewables and fossil fuels.
- nocoiner 3y agoHow well did natural gas do when it was unseasonably cold and the wellheads froze over? I don’t see a single person in this thread commenting in good faith who’s not in favor of a robust energy mix. But you’re deluding yourself if you think that the political body that is ERCOT is acting solely (or even primarily) toward the establishment of a robust grid based on apolitical engineering and a variety of predictably reliable sources of energy without regard to how that power is generated.
- perrygeo 3y agoERCOT is definitely concerned with how the power is generated, I made no claim to the contrary. They just don't have the luxury of seeing it as a mutually exclusive choice based on morals. Sure, there's a political bias towards phasing out fossil fuels. Most of the new construction is in renewables. Anyone in the energy industry knows that depletion, EROI descent, and climate change are real problems associated with long-term fossil fuel usage. There are also well-known mineral resource limits and intermittency/storage issues with renewables. There are voices, on the right and the left, that take extreme positions on the role of renewables and fossil fuels. Maybe not anyone in this thread, but the world at large is full of people advocating for an energy mix that uncompromisingly reflects their moral philosophy. Fossil fuels bad. Renewables will save us. Or vice-versa. My point is that these extreme positions tend to dominate social media and news cycles - but they don't reflect the actual development of our energy systems, which take a more nuanced and balanced approach by necessity. ERCOT is beholden to actual results, unlike political advocates.
- nocoiner 3y agoI appreciate the thoughtful response. You raise a lot of good points. I think we may just agree to disagree on ERCOT’s current role. For a nearly lifelong Texas resident, I always thought of them the way you’re describing them. Given the events and outages of the last three years, my perception of them now is that they are much more of a political animal than I had previously understood and frankly are not doing that great of a job of delivering actual results. Again, reasonable people can disagree here, but for me personally, the Texas grid has gone from a point of pride about a well managed system that reliably delivers power to some of the most energy intensive industries in the country (to say nothing of a fast growing population in a not exactly temperate climate) to a creature of the governor and the legislature that’s failing at job one.
- richardanaya 3y agoBuild more nuclear power.
- EricE 3y agolol - investments in renewables suck the oxygen for investing in baseload generation out of the room, then get credit for saving a problem they promulgated? What a time to be alive!