this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2024
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It's still wasted energy. If it wasn't used on bitcoins, it would have been used on other things - some of which had to be powered by fossil fuels.
Without bitcoin, the renewable energy plants wouldn't have been built.
We don't have a shortage of electricity in the world, we just don't have enough incentive to make it renewable.
How does that even make sense? Renewable is cheaper than burning petrol, of course there's a shortage.
Mining is a great way to deal with excess energy from solar farms.
When solar power plants produce more energy than needed, that means we have to shut down some of the plants temporarily. This is costly, and also means we require alternative energy for cloudy and rainy days. Solar still produces energy on these days, but not enough.
If we make more solar plants so we can have enough energy even for cloudy days we instead get too much energy on sunny days, and we are forced to shut down the plants temporarily, and this is essentially wasted money for these electric companies, so why would they want more solar plants?
Producing a lot of plants just to expect them to run with low efficiency and with half of them shut down on sunny days is wasteful and costly.
However, if we instead have mining rigs consume the excess energy, we get a stable energy flow, because mining rigs will turn on and off based on the cost of electricity. Supply and demand stabilize.
I don't think you understand how the electric grid works if you say that wasting energy into creating heat is the way to go.
People keep saying "creating heat" as if that's the cause of global warming. And it isn't just creating heat, it is running an entire ecosystem.