They provide a legitimate demand response service i.e. when the grid is generating excess energy that there's no other demand for, Bitcoin miners buy what no one else wants/needs.
Texas has a lot of gas plants (51%) that we want to idle when possible. Just because it's cheaper power doesn't mean we should be generating it when the only customer is cryptocoins.
If the cost of gas isn’t covering the actual impact then the cost should be higher, doesn’t matter if the kWh is used by a bitcoin miner or someone with their AC at 70, it’s still the same externality.
I think it’s pretty easy to understand that what amounts to a game isn’t even vaguely comparable to something that provides an immediate and quantifiable impact for someone. Perhaps you don’t understand that bitcoin is a leech on society with no real benefit.
The reality is that fiat is the leech on society. It's a cancer on the world, slowly destroying it. Bitcoin is the cure. It's one of the most important inventions in the history of mankind and it's positive effects on the world will be profound. I'd go as far as saying that it's more important than the internet itself.
Watch some Michael Saylor/Robert Breedlove interviews and educate yourself. Read "The Creature From Jekyll Island".
Thank God Texas generates power from unlimited resources. In my place, the more we generate and consume, the less we have left for the future. In Texas, the plants have to generate as much as possible for some reason !
> ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas and others gave shocking testimony today in the Senate Committee on Business & Commerce that within only six years (that’s only three legislative sessions), our power grid needs will grow from about 85,000 to 150,000 megawatts. That is much higher than the 110,000 megawatts they previously projected. The 110,000 megawatts was already a big increase, which is why the Senate pushed our incentive plan to build more dispatchable power last session. 150,000 megawatts is almost double the megawatts we now have on the grid.
> Later testimony said the growth is due to the increases in population, normal business growth, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, crypto miners and data centers will be responsible for over 50% of the added growth. We need to take a close look at those two industries. They produce very few jobs compared to the incredible demands they place on our grid. Crypto mining may actually make more money selling electricity back to the grid than from their crypto mining operations.
> Texans will ultimately pay the price. I’m more interested in building the grid to service customers in their homes, apartments, and normal businesses and keeping costs as low as possible for them instead of for very niche industries that have massive power demands and produce few jobs. We want data centers, but it can’t be the Wild Wild West of data centers and crypto miners crashing our grid and turning the lights off.
> The Senators asked why this had not been disclosed before today. #txlege
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The theory is/was that Texas grid works "best" (the market runs most efficiently) when its running at the most capacity (everyone with something that can generate power is making money - this is better than conserving and asking polluting or less efficent sources to spin down when the demand isn't there ... in theory) with the ability to have things that can't pay for the increased price (in theory, that was supposed to be crypto) scale back their use when other demand goes up.
And the fact that in some time periods it seems the miners made more money from downscaling energy demand during peak loads than they did from mining activities.
Plus residents in some areas are up in arms that these companies got a variety of tax exemptions and sweetheart deals, jobs never materialised (because how many people do you need?), and what they seem to get in return is more expensive power bills.
