Bitcoin miner purchases 112-megawatt North Texas wind farm

I have been told to prepare for the worst. Acquire some backup power because data centers and miners will cause brownouts to outages across Texas during peak usage.<p>We already have some outages in North Texas during these periods of high heat. Your 800k house turns into an oven when it&#x27;s 110 outside because of the poor building standards across the state. Without steady power and cooling for 5 months of the year, the state is uninhabitable.<p>Thank you Gov Abbot for deregulation, it is working just like you planned.

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I sincerely hope the seller of the wind farm reinvests the proceeds into a new wind farm!<p>If so I can probably convince myself this is broadly good news. I don&#x27;t think the miner was going to switch their data centre off, so I&#x27;m pleased they are using renewable energy rather than fossil fuels.<p>I wonder what the bitcoin price would have to be before they decide to reconnect the wind farm to the grid and start selling electricity instead of burning it mining crypto. I kind of hope that&#x27;s where we&#x27;ll end up but history has taught me that bitcoin doesn&#x27;t want to die, even though Ethereum doesn&#x27;t need proof of work anymore!

What kind of goods and commodities are traded with Bitcoin?<p>What is the size of the Bitcoin economy, as in real goods traded with it, not financial and actual currency speculation?

This is a really interesting solution to the problem with renewable power that there&#x27;s no way to store it efficiently when demand is low, except batteries which are way too expensive.<p>They could sell power during the day and mine bitcoin at night, whichever is more profitable at the time.<p>edit: I just read the article and actually they&#x27;re not selling power at all. Oh well. Bitcoin must be more profitable than selling the power. The free market at work.

When the spot price of power makes it more profitable to sell power they’ll sell power. When it’s less profitable they’ll mine bitcoin. This makes a lot of power available when it’s needed. Not as good as deploying a grid-scale battery, but better than no wind power.

Coincidentally, I got a call from a West Texas oil man who is burning natural gas. He&#x27;s too remote and there is no easy way to move the natural gas to market. It&#x27;s all being wasted. There are companies in Texas that purchase natural gas, but I was skeptical. His idea is to use this free energy to mine bitcoin. Then this article.<p>So, why not? Unfortunately, I don&#x27;t know enough to guide him. If you do, contact me and I&#x27;ll put you in touch.

At this scale it should be easy to find and ban miners from your country. They bring nothing of value to the economy.

Not found.

Money &gt; People