This is so dumb. But it gives some insight into the metrics.
If we back into it, 116,000 Th/s will get us 1BTC/day.
Let's assume Antminer S9s. Those give us 13 Th/s and take 1.3kW ea. Hey that's convenient, we're at 1tH/s per kWh.
1186 BTC in one year is 3.25 BTC/day. That's 377,000 Th/S which, conveniently, is 377MW/h, or 15.7 MW of capacity. Call it 16MW.
Again, I'm going to invite WanderingEng to look at me because it's nice having a power engineer to tell you you're full of shit... but I've helped spec 20MW standby power generation and... I mean...
A CAT 3516 is 2MW. 8 CAT 3516s is 16MW. Ballpark it at 120gal/hr. Number 2 diesel is $1.91 in bulk - call it 2ish bucks. I'm burning $1900/hr cranking out 16MW, or 12 cents per kWH (assuming the generators were free and never break).
We're not doing diesel, though, we're doing natural gas, which is going to be 200k BTU per hour per 2MW. Electric price is $3 bucks or so, industrial price, per thousand BTU. So I think I'm looking at $533/hr in gas, or 3.3 cents per kWh.
But that's because they get to buy it as an industrial power production facility, not a commercial facility.
Here's the plant. They've got 14MW making 5.5 BTC per day, as it turns out. It's got a capacity of 100MW. Considering it was "once abandoned" it seems to me that if the local communities stopped buying power from them, they cease to be a utility.
Which would more than double their gas prices.
And raise their costs of operation above that of a wind farm.
Dunno, man. This looks like regulatory arbitrage to me. Get rid of the arbitrage, get rid of the bitcoin miners.
I think all your math looks good except for one thing: the natural gas genset you linked is probably more efficient than this plant because the plant uses a boiler. These purpose built engines can be much more efficient than a boiler. Side note: there's still a natural gas boiler here in town with a water outlet into the lake. I've swam through it, and it's incredibly warm. Like warm bathtub warm, even when the rest of the lake is mild. Thankfully the plant doesn't run much anymore.
A couple thoughts overall:
I don't think the local community can do anything to stop buying power from them. From what I gather from the article, the generator is connected to the grid but from a metering perspective outputs nothing. Generators have always had auxiliary load, especially coal and nuclear plants with big pumps and pulverizers. Those are all netted with plant output. It seems they have their miners all hooked up on the plant side of the metering. They are selling power to nobody but themselves.
The way to kill this plant is to eliminate once-through cooling. Make them build a cooling tower and the plant will die overnight.
About wind farms, and solar will have the same problem: the capital cost of the miners is a major expense, so they want zero downtime. While they could net against a wind or solar plant, they'd have to stop mining when the wind dies down or the sun sets. They could buy power from the grid, but now they expose themselves to utility pricing which could open them up to higher rates for crypto mining.
Cooling towers are cool. Everyone should build cooling towers. I developed a great deal of respect when I got to tour the UW powerplant and see the bitchin' cooling tower. If I were an eccentric billionaire I'd make a house shaped like a giant fuckin' cooling tower just to make people wonder.
Crypto private equity dweebs should definitely have to build cooling towers.
Is that photo from Satsop? That's a place every probably 18 months pops back into my mind as a place that would be really interesting to check out.
I have a thing for abandoned places, better yet if it's abandoned infrastructure, and best is abandoned electric power. There are a number of abandoned, incomplete nuclear power plants scattered across the country and world! None near me, just cancelled plans before they started construction. One property was an army air targeting range in the '40s and '50s, sold to the utility who planned to build a nuclear plant there, and when that fell through the property was sold and became a golf course.
My wife and I want to get solar panels next year after a new roof. We just got an EV, and expect that our power needs may be higher than the previous year. However, DTE does not let you connect panels that would produce more than your average electricity used in the previous year.
I suggested that we mine bitcoin this year to increase our average power consumption at less cost so that we can install more solar next. Maybe Jack was talking about me.
Our laws needs to catch up faster with the modern world. DTE's concern (besides the obvious no competition one) is that there are giant fixed cost with running a grid whose funding would be hampered by the creation of excess capacity. We should be running a model of a fixed fee plus a marginally lower per unit energy charge, as opposed to the pure per unit charge. In that case, everyone who wants to be on the grid still pays the depreciation instead of simply coming up with an illogical an unsustainable rule like no excess generation.
Similarly, what's going to happen to the roads when (very heavy) EVs are dominant (or even a significant proportion) and there is a huge loss in gas tax revenue? The price of driving an EV is currently subsidized by everyone not driving an EV and that has change and soon. We need a weight plus usage tax, which is not technically hard but probably requires more political will than we currently have.
I don't know about Michigan, but both WA and CA have laws on the books that the power companies are required to buy power from you at the same rate they sell it. The windmill folx have dealt with this forever; Puget Sound Energy is the best battery you could hope to buy.
SoCal Edison, on the other hand, has absolutely no fucking idea how to deal with net power... because it cuts into their margins. So there are solar panels all over SoCal that can't spin your meter backwards. To no one's surprise this launched lawsuits and because it's California, Goliath slays David all the time.
DTE's concern, dollars to donuts, is that buying power at the prices they sell power is a stinker for them and rather than upgrade and face the future they'd prefer to kill hundreds of people.
- Similarly, what's going to happen to the roads when (very heavy) EVs are dominant (or even a significant proportion) and there is a huge loss in gas tax revenue? The price of driving an EV is currently subsidized by everyone not driving an EV and that has change and soon.
Counterpoint: the externalities of driving an internal combustion vehicle are currently subsidized by everyone breathing. Infrastructure is always something Democrats do and Republicans starve.
- Infrastructure is always something Democrats do and Republicans starve.
100% But right now, at least in MI, the already shitty road infrastructure is funded in part by gas tax. When that dries up, are the GOP going to be OK raising taxes elsewhere to make up the shortfall? We both know the answer is no. I'm not trying to argue that EVs are better or ICs are better in any specific way. I'm only trying to argue that we need to invest serious political capital into modernizing the way we pay for things we depend on.
I am firmly of the opinion that the Biden administration is fully at "Quick: Republicans are culture-warring - advance socialism!"
Tuning every country in the world to at least a 15% tax rate means they can drop the hammer on FAANG because while the composite tax rate in the US is a little bit lower than the rest of the developed world, the loophole soup we have here is principally what does it. The Biden administration can go through and kill loopholes that benefit large corporations and the public will be so busy arguing about Critical Race Theory that Amazon will be FUKT.
My immediate reaction to DTE's rule was "Then how do we go off the grid?" I think if we added geothermal and a battery we could get close. We are remodeling this year, so new windows and water heater are happening, and we will probably wrap the house before new siding.
The battery is the issue at the moment. ~$7k for 10kWh AFAIK. Charging the car and limited sunlit roof area is probably going to keep us on the grid. My cousin has geothermal, is putting a solar array on acreage, and her husband is building a battery, which he said is much more cost effective. They should be off the grid when done. He mentioned that Ford's F150 EV will not only draw power, but can be used as a battery.
Everyone should be repulsed by the old model. If DTE were thinking long term they'd be embracing the change instead of using their monopoly to inhibit progress. You'd think we'd all have learned the lessons of the railroads long ago. No industry is permanent.
- Becoming multi-planetary is vital to our future, and Elon knows this very well
Candidate for non-sequitur of the year? Oh wait, no, the very next sentence:
- Since the Mars colony will be self-sustained, we have good reason to believe that their currency will be $BTC
I gave up on blackbootz' discord server when I had to go eleven rounds explaining the concept of scrip only to encounter "that is not my dogma therefore you are a poopyhead."
They say "fiat" a lot as if they know what it is but it's actually just a synonym for "satan".
How much money do you think Jack Dorsey made off of that comment? Yeah I'm sure that New York state will be looking into making practices like what's described in the article illegal sooner than later.