Bitcoin Forum

A lot of grid is wasted during off peak times. Energy is stored or sold in inefficient manners. Instead, they should use any excess energy in mining bitcoins to sell. Rather than raising electric rates, they can increase their customer base. Their price discovery will be the electricity/btc pair. They can choose which will be most profitable. Storage can then be bought by customers for their needs based on rates. This just seems more efficient than being forced to sell to only one market.

Well, the extra-energy can be stored and sold later. I think that it isn't profitable mining bitcoin with this extra-energy because of the high price of the ASICs (and the maintenance). Not only free electricity is necesary to mine bitcoin, it's necesary a investment in machines and space.

Bye :P

Not every industry is interested in Bitcoin or Bitcoin mining.

Power companies have no reason to start mining Bitcoin because they have extra not used/needed energy.

Battery storage suck. We don't even have decent electric cars. Why should power companies buy expensive wasteful batteries?

Not all the extra-energy is stored in batteries. Do you know about Pumped storage hydroelectricity? (and it's only an example). Bitcoin is not profitable for the electricity companies.

Bye!

It is a good idea! The company shifts excessive electricity to mining bitcoin and generate another cash flow!From another point of view, other mining farms can't compete with power company who has cheap electricity!

Actually, I think its more profitable and better for ASIC manufacturer as compare to power company to mine bitcoin. Power company can do other related business like selling battery.

 

If ASIC is more profitable for ASIC manufacturer, then power company can become ASIC manufacturer instead of battery.

That's only a tiny percent of electricity produced.

As the block reward shrinks over the next few decades, and mining competition gets even tighter, I've always assumed that mining would migrate to locations with the cheapest electricity and the cheapest forms of cooling.  Depending on just how profitable mining becomes, it is very likely that mining companies will eventually merge with (or create their own) electricity companies in order to get the cheapest possible electricity.  They will also probably migrate towards the poles in search of ever cheaper cooling.

Another possibility is that ASIC companies eventually begin creating consumer devices that make use of the heat such as ASIC powered home heating systems and ASIC powered water heaters.  If these devices catch on, then they could increase the difficulty to the point where it is no longer profitable for large mining companies to exist (even if they have access to extremely cheap electricity and cooling).

You could probably say this about many things. Why don't potatoe farmers just make fries etc? It's not their industry or business to do so, even if they could turn a decent profit on it. Remember they need to fork out for the hardware and find space for them etc.

And yet, some farmers enter exclusive business agreements with compaines such as McDonald's and all of their potatoes become either fries or hashbrowns.


Certainly, but a profitable very large mining company might find it to be in their best interest to either purchase a power company, partner with a power company, or build their own.

batteries lol....you know what a transformer is right?

Yes, it converts (transforms) alternating current to either higher voltage with lower current or lower voltage with higher current.  It does this through electrical induction between two coils with differing numbers of windings.  What does that have to do with the discussion at hand?

Actually, this happened (on a very small scale). There is one guy who bought (or rented..? don't know)
a small water power plant. I mean really small. I think the normal way would be to sell the electricity,
so "become a power company". But instead he put miners in it. (He also offers hosting, though.)

I think he's right. They use transformer stations to change amperage for long distance transmission on the grid. Still it's not very efficient compared to batteries and bitcoin would be more efficient still.

There is one company... still dark/experimental utilizing some very ingenious electrical usage operations here in the US.

They are setting up urban/inner city grow farms. Using Solar Wind and friction electrical generation, converting blighted inner city buildings warehouses, factories and whatnot into indoor all natural controlled environment veggie/fruit growing and utilizing excess energy to BTC mining which is more profitable than selling the extra capacity back to the electric company. The mining is allowing across the board cost savings on every level of their op's and free heating as needed in their grow ops.

Too bad the utility companies do not think outside the box like alot of indy's are currently doing and executing.

Doing this might also influence them to accept payments via BTC :-P

They will, but not yet. Check back in 3-4 years.

Lol in 3-4 maybe only electric companies will be able to afford to pay the electricity to keep mining them :-P

They only talk batteries when they talk solar cells/wind energies. Stuff that produces electricity when it's not necessary.

The current grid doesn't need batteries with its current design.

A voltage is potential energy. A transformer transforms voltage yes but is also a storage of potential energy via a magnetic field.

So, yes you need a battery for wind energy or solar energy because it does not produce a steady state energy. Thus you can't power a transformer because you do not have a constant potential difference. You think a coal power company or anything that runs off a turbine is using batteries lol?

No. He's wrong.

He's claiming that they use transformers to "store" electricity in magnetic fields:


He's also claiming that you can't power a transformer with wind or solar energy:


He doesn't seem to understand how the electric power supply companies operate at all.  He doesn't realize that they waste resources during off-peak times due to being sized for peak loads, that wind, solar, or any other form of alternating current can power a transformer, or that transformers do not "store" electricity.

It doesn't necessarily work that way. The harder a generator works (bigger electrical load) the more it uses fossil fuel. The difference between running at full load and half load wouldn't be the amount of electricity wasted it would be the consumption rate of fossil fuels. 

Well in a lot of countries like Sweden Smart grids are coming up. So during off peak hours, most of the energy is now stored and not wasted .
So it would actually be hard to use that to mine bitcoins .However in some developing countries, the waste still happens , and those might be perfect places to do this.
Not sure how welcoming some of the companies would be to the idea, and would be willing to spend money into the mining gear for this.

The cost of electricity is rising anyway, so what the hell!!!

Let's start mining!!!

That's great. How do they store it? Customers can also bear the cost of storage. If the power companies focused on generating revenue, maybe they can offer cheaper power. I realize Sweden treats power as a commons and that's fine. This idea doesn't oppose socialism, it shifts the energy storage from centralized to decentralized. Individuals and municipalities can compete for bitcoin or energy, depending what they need.

I work in a power company..! I get free elec. but I dont have a decent internet connection to support miners!

Do you know you don't need a decent internet connection to start mining? Even 56k is good enough.

You get free electricity for private consumption in your home? So they just waive your bill? Sounds
like a jackpot to me :D

Some places the electricity and other such things are included with the rent. My friend pays a fixed fee and he gets everything water gas electricity and even internet though that would likely change if he decided to run a mining farm lol.

Yeah Free elec for home.!! It is awesome but I am not able to use it profitably... I want to start a rig.!! but not much investments..+ no good/cheap internet.!

A lot of government employees in India get free electricity and other resources.
I am sure a lot of people take advantage of this. Maybe they should use it for mining

Yeah, if the employeers gets free electricity they can use this electricity to mine bitcoin. But not the companies.

There is no FREE electricity, forget it! Mining Bitcoins isn't cheap at the current difficulty.

I'm not saying power plants give away their power. I'm saying it's more efficient for them to mine bitcoins and pass the savings to customers that can store their own peak power needs.

would be a good, but certainly energy companies would benefit from it

You cannot really store energy, those methods popped up in the renewables sphere mostly, more often only there.

The issue regarding POW mining is that it can absorb any amount of power supply. On the long, we need something else besides that.

I'm not sure what you mean by "absorb any amount of power supply." Mining is voluntary. PoW proves the energy. It's a matter of physics what you do with the work. You can always turn it back into energy.

The problem with selling energy units is counterparty risk, especially with energy market manipulation. I'm not saying we burn all our produced energy, just the energy that the grid wastes over long distances. Energy is easy to store locally, or at least it should be if we want to get away from burning carbon.

I can see this happening even in smaller mining farms. I have a friend that built a cabin on a couple acres of land on a stream in the mountains of NorCal. He loved it but had no electric power because it was too remote. He researched solar and wind power but concluded that they wouldn't work well enough where the cabin was located. He discussed his problem with a friend and they came up with this crazy idea of putting paddle wheels in the stream to turn a generator. The stream gets low at certain times of the year so they dug out and poured a concrete kind of bath tub looking thing in the part of the stream he owns and hung what looks like a can that squirts water out four tubes on to a fan blade. This is hung on steel pipes in the stream with a shaft that connects with pullys to an Onan generator on a concrete pad on the bank. They wired the cabin and it works all year long providing power. The best part is, he didn't even need to install a battery storage system because it's always generating electric. He invited a few of us on a hunting trip (wife code for a weekend long drunken card game) and gave us a tour of how it works. I never realized getting free power was that easy before. He even mounted a satellite dish on a tree for TV and Internet. I asked him if he visits his wife occasionally because if I had his setup I'd probably never go home.

I wonder if power companies can take the risk & waiting for ROI with crazy difficult right now  :(

How about hardware mining companies / cloud mining companies mine bitcoin before their product sold to their customer
So, they got profit from their customer & from mining  ;D

I think storing power is quite expensive. I think OP is right. They should definitely think of it.

No, that's not even wrong.  But there's very little waste in modern power grids--excess capacity is simply shut down/taken offline, so there's little point in blowing millions of dollars on mining gear which will only mine a fraction of the time (as it becomes obsolete).  Here's a pic:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/Electricity_Grid_Schematic_English.svg/694px-Electricity_Grid_Schematic_English.svg.png

Well, that's what I meant. They know the current draw at peak and non peak times and would either slow their fuel feed or bring generators offline.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a power company storing energy in batteries.

Storing it, hilarious.  That was a good one, storing it, you're cute.

Right. This would also only make the confirmation time unstable as the electric companies would shut off their mining gear in peak demand times which would cause the confirmation time to suddenly increase.

Yeah, you are right. There are times when it costs you money to produce electricity and people get money for consuming electricity. At those times you could power up your rig with hardware no matter how old. You could even use old BFL gear or outdated KNC hardware... Man this would mean double the profit for you!

You really can not store AC power in any meaningful way....  and AC to DC,  then back to AC for transmission....  that isn't efficient either.

The power system, likely looses about 25 to 40 percent of the energy from generation to your door in things like line loss, along with losses at transmission.

While I am not saying the OP's idea is good or bad, since power systems are run by governments, and they manage to mess it all up at least 3/4 of the time.....  storing electrical energy isn't as easy as you would think.

I don't think this is true. Do you have any sources on this? It has been (somewhat) proven above that the electric grid (in the US at least) is very efficient and looses little via leakage getting electricity from electric plants to where it is used

Transmission and converting AC to DC and back to AC are completely different things.

Also batteries are wildly expensive.. like stupid stupid expensive.  Storing the power is something only a noob would say.. I am sorry but it is true.