> Some of these tactics have proven controversial with consumers. One program that pays big power users like cryptocurrency operations millions to conserve, has come under particular scrutiny, as Texans have been asked to conserve voluntarily for months.<p>This is... amazing. Not in a good way.
Don't worry, Texas is just helping the crypto miners rather than their citizens again. "The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) paid a bitcoin miner $31.7 million in energy credits in August to not mine bitcoin. During the August heat wave, ERCOT issued eight calls for voluntary energy conservation. People were asked to adjust home thermostats or delay doing laundry during the energy call."
The article states that the sharp drop in reserves was being “investigated,” and that it is “suspected” that a large power plant stopped working.<p>Is observability of Texan infrastructure so poor that the _power company_ doesn’t have a comprehensive view of _which power plants are operational_?
the more I read about ERCOT, the texas energy council, the more im convinced its a grift that wasnt designed to survive the test of climate change.<p>ERCOT reform was announced by Governor Abbott in 2021, but that same reform was also penned in a nearly 400 page report that was completely ignored during ERCOT's 2011 failure.<p><a href="https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2021/03/26/in-20-years-ercot-has-been-a-misbehaving-secretive-arrogant-even-criminal-grid-operator/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2021/03/26/in-20-ye...</a>
This is politics in a nutshell. People keep voting for the same politicians so they keep the same problems. Power infrastructure is poor? Keep voting for the same people that made it that way. Lots of violent crime in your city? Keep voting for the people that release criminals back into society immediately.<p>Politics is so binary and broken in this country that we are just making fixable issues into permanent hardships.<p>This is a Dem and Rep problem and more importantly the end result of a 2 party system.<p>That and corruption all the way down.
This is the first I've seen data on high demand growth this summer (I live in Texas and try to follow these issues).<p>> The power grid has seen overall demand grow 7% this summer, after two decades of predictable 1% per year growth, and 10 preliminary demand records since late June. [1]<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/ercot-grid-conservation-request-18351400.php" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/erc...</a>
What's stopping power companies from ramping up energy production? They know in advance there will be problems. What stopping them from just producing more? I realize there are some peculiarities of the Texas grid, but this is obviously a problem beyond Texas, as California and east coast has blackouts as well. I'm asking about all these cases.<p>I imagine maybe this requires some additional infrastructure that simply doesn't exist. If so, what's the barrier to building this infrastructure?
I live in Texas and we’ve been dancing on the edge of energy availability for weeks now. If you glance at ERCOT’s public graphs that estimate energy supply and demand, every evening we’re barely eeking by. From what I’ve heard, this should be improving daily as temperatures ease, but I guess not. Surprising that we had an emergency episode in September rather than two weeks ago.<p>If Texas can’t supply enough energy in the summer, I have no hope for what our future winters will look like.
As a Texan, I think whats going on in Texas, perhaps controversially is what happens when you have an over reliance on solar and wind as primary power sources. Even in Texas (where wind is basically ever-present) there are times when the wind does not blow.<p>I think wind and solar are great, and we should build more, but you also need a sizable amount of thermal generation (preferably nuclear) to provide for base load.<p>I dont think thermal can be replaced readily with gas turbine, battery, pumped storage, or other forms of rapid spin up equipment.<p>I have the somewhat controversial opinion that things like bitcoin are useful because they create static demand, and by doing so make the excess generation from wind and solar economical, thereby keeping the spot price in the grid high enough that thermal generation is still cost effective to build and operate - I dont think we should be paying them to shut down, they should just be disconnected wholesale from the grid during periods of ultra high demand as a condition of their interconnection to it.
> The call came, the group said, as heat drove energy demand up and wind power was forecasted to be low.<p>Renewable energy is not reliable or stable enough to be as large of a share of the power grid as it already is. ERCOT is running into this first because it’s a smaller grid and has less margin for error, but the other two US grids are going to have the same problem in time.
Currently also predicting more demand than capacity today: <a href="https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/supplyanddemand" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.ercot.com/gridmktinfo/dashboards/supplyanddemand</a>
EV's<p>This will become a bigger issue for all as more EV's gain adoption.<p>And with the reluctance to use nuclear, there's not many reliable options for clean energy.
Unpopular opinion (and so strange that a red state like Texas did it this way), but: Texas is far too dependent on wind power, fossil fuel plants (even natural gas!) being shut down at the behest of the federal govt, and definitely not enough nuclear, although those can take quite a few years to come online.
Related thread from today:<p><i>Texas paid Bitcoin miner Riot $31.7M to shut down in August</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418866">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418866</a>
Wait, so instead of charging their crypto mining customers more, they are paying them not to mine? WTF? You have to love their "free market" energy grid /s
There's a lot of misunderstanding in the comments so far regarding bitcoin mining incentives. I urge you to read this thread describing the split-second load-shedding response time from the POV of one of these miners:<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ogbtc/status/1699588007664275873" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/ogbtc/status/1699588007664275873</a><p>It also goes into the other mechanism by which they make money (being natural sellers of future energy demand contracts during times of high demand). This mechanism is similar to how other commodity markets operate with producers, consumers with steady future demand, and consumers with unpredictable short-term demand.<p>Our energy grids need to keep an equal demand/production at all times, and on-demand load-shedding is a valuable part of this equation. The bitcoin miners are providing a service to ERCOT and being paid for it. If there were a more "productive" source of on-demand energy usage, then it will replace the bitcoin miners, this is how markets work (of which both energy production/consumption and capitalism in general are).<p>This is the reality of how the texas energy grid works at present. The bitcoin miners, for lack of a (subjectively) "better" option, are filling the two needs of elastic load-shedding and predictable future demand. The first is very hard to fill, the latter can probably be fulfilled more productively with steady demand from other industries (factories, data centers, other things that run 24h per day).<p>One more edit: this whole equation changes COMPLETELY if we have the ability to store energy production in times of low demand to be used in future times of high demand (batteries). We don't currently have this at any sort of reasonably useful scale, we need this, and the current "market" everyone is upset about is a bandaid on top of the lack of decent storage options. For the climate folks, the anti-bitcoin folks, whoever disagrees with what I've said here: Fix the storage issue and everything gets magically better. Good luck, it's a very hard problem with very nasty environmental impacts, I'm rooting for you.
According to my Google foo, around 1000 people per day have been moving to Texas in the last three years alone. Put anywhere between a half million to three quarters of a million additional people on the power grid in a three year span and the grid is bound to have issues.<p>Also, really like how the majority of the comments sound like Reddit /r/politics's far left, adult man child, ignorant insights.
Before the blockchain hate gets too intense just wanted to remind that Bitcoin is the odd one out using a proof-of-work algorithm. Pretty much every other project uses a security technique that is light on power-consumption.
It would have had blackouts if it didn't build all those bitcoin mines. The bitcoin mines encouraged power infrastructure development, and they can just be taken offline when high heat causes power demand spikes for air conditioning.
Just a few months ago on HN there was a thread discussing the upcoming summer.<p>Was surprised just how many 'free-market' advocates came out to say how great things were, how the market has created additional supply, and all this was just lib panic.<p>They are paying 'crypto-miners' to temporarily stop running? That is absurd. So I could make money just by moving a mining operation to Texas, and wait for a shutdown.<p>How much failure does it take to realize some regulation is good. It benefits everyone.
A map of power outages over the last few years with TX, CA, LA, WA and MI in the lead: <a href="https://www.fixr.com/articles/power-outage-solutions" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.fixr.com/articles/power-outage-solutions</a><p>Maine is a headscratcher with HydroQuebec across the border.