Throttle power usage to available solar power

[Solarscaler]

Hi All,
I've searched the forums, tried all kinds of search terms through google to find a solution or the parts for a solution that I could string together:
During the day I have surplus free solar power of up to about 7500W at a time. (I haven't looked at the average range yet). This surplus gets put back into the grid. Depending on the amount of renewables in the grid at the time, I get up to 0.22c/kWh for it. It also happens occasionaly that when there is a surplus of power in the grid (again due to renewables) I have to pay to get rid of my excess! (while this sounds like madness the opposite side of the coin is that I get my power cheaper and can even get periods when I am payed to use electricity - but thats usually when I am trying to offload solar)
So in a perfect world I would have a mining setup that turns on in daylight hours, runs at a standby requirement, but then hashes with appropriate power increase (and appropriate hash rate increase) according to how much free power is available.  I have smart meters which can output the data of whats available to be used. All I have to beat is 0.22c/kWh and smooth over the negatives and I will be ahead. In the last two years I have on average pushed 4.4MWh/year to the grid.

The problem is the on the fly scaleability. In a perfect world, if someone turns on both ducted aircon systems the available excess power will drop to 0W with likely a small draw from the grid if the solar system is running at peak. Its a reasonable large domestic solar system >12KW  because of said very hungry air conditioners. At that point in a perfect system, the miner power draw would drop to a nominal standby power until there is sufficient power for it to start up again.

My understanding from reading manuals and forum posts is that ASIC miners can only change their power usage by changing clock speed and voltage which cannot be done on the fly: firmware change and reboot.I haven't found another way for the ASIC miner to regulate its power draw (and related hash rate).
Is there no other way? I thought I would ask here first as this is where the ASIC experience is.

I explored custom firmware for ASIC miner, different OS' ie BraiinsOS , awesome miner and couldnt find potential rabbit holes to follow.
Am I looking in the wrong place? I'm hoping someone could just point me in the right direction.

CrazyDane has a great setup but he has net metering - ie the grid acts as a large infinite battery for him at no cost so my problems are very different. Speaking of batteries, even with all that power its still not financially viable yet (though I might need to look at that equation with a mining system in it, though without a battery up I'm up for less risk.

I have a feeling GPU mining (and thus alt coins) might be the most likely place such a solution may lie as the multiple discrete GPUs may supply the granularity for a solution.
I am new to this , so there might even be something very fundamental I am missing which makes this a pipe dream.

Looking forward to hearing from the knowledgeable. Please ask if I haven't made something clear. or more info is required.
Thanks.
SolarScaler

(Edited: a few words added for clarity)

[philipma1957]

wow interesting question.

here is what I don’t understand.

why do you need on the fly ?


you only have 7500 excess watts.

let us pretend you have 3 s17 pro units that use brains 🧠

low setting is 3 x 1400 = 4200 watts.


medium setting is 3 x 2200 = 6600 watts.

you are always going to chase the power available.

which means a reboot.


In both cases you need to detect the power shortage and react to it.


but if you use gpu and simple mining ⛏ you still chase the power

so it boots or resets a bit faster.


why not simply set either a s17pro to low or a set of gpus to low.

ie pull 1400:watts and not worry about crashing do too lack of power.

maybe get some s15 set on low at 900 watts.

one rig would most likely just run.

 a s15 is pretty cheap.

[Solarscaler]

Hi Philipma, thanks for replying.

The excess power is free solar power but I don't actually run out of power that would cause a reboot. The solar system is connected to the grid.

If my panels are creating 8kW and I am only using 2kW in my home the system will be putting 6kW into the grid and I get paid very little for it.
If I turn on both air conditioners on a hot day they might use 7kW on startup then total usage is 9kW. The extra 1kW will come from the grid- it might be even more, much more, if there are clouds or rain about.

So if I was running 3x S17 pro on medium at 6.6kW with back ground 2kW home usage and the air conditioners go on (7kW), total usage 15.6 kW, the solar will take care of 8kw, 7.6kW will come from the grid and the s17's will just keep running happily without any concern.

Ideally I'd like the smart meter to say, I have detected that you have 5kW free solar and the ASIC miner system just powers up to that and then should the air conditioners go on, it powers down so that I can only use the free solar and not the more expensive grid energy.


I have started considering that If I looked at my monthly home usage, solar production per month, I have over 2 yrs data, I could chose a miner setup that when running at a constant power draw and over the correct time period in a day would result in using a mix of solar and grid power, but if I do it correctly it would maximise free solar time and thus increase profitability.

If I use a newer higher efficiency miner I could be in the position to be still being profitable, but much less so when on grid. That means that even on cloudy days I'll still be in the green. I would have to look at those variables and the margins in that.

But with a system that could power scale, it would be really great as I wouldn't have to be concerned about the much more expensive grid power as opposed to excess free solar. Hope that all makes sense.
Thanks again.

[JayDDee]

Wow, a rare case of real excess power. I thought only utilities had that problem.

Using miners as a sink for excess power is an interesting concept. The only way to modulate them is to shutdown
or startup individual mining rigs to match the supply of power. I have no idea if a controller exists for that sort of thing.

Other than finding other uses for the excess power reducing production is better than paying to dispose of the excess
or burning it off with resistors.

It looks like you are in a very competitive situation. When the sun shines it shines for everyone. Timeshifting using batteries
might be an option. Charge the batteries when the sun is shining and prices are low, then sell the power when the sun sets
and prices rise.

[UniJo]

I don't know if its possible and how the miners/ASICS react to a hard shutdown but maybe you can make a batch file on a smart relay board or something like

excess power:
1kW start miner 1
2kW start miner 2
3kW start miner 3
etc..
etc...

This if you have ASICS that use 1kW each.

Note: i don't know how fast you power consumption fluctuates and how long the ASICS need to startup.

[styleshifter]

I see two options.

1.
You could switch on/off a complete rig or AISC with a smart power plug.
You would need some home automation like openHAB for this.
With this solution you could increase or decrease in steps of 500-1500 W depending on the hardware.

2.
If you go for GPU mining you could control the power consumption with the mining software.
You can switch on/off every single card in your rig.
With this solution you could increase or decrease in steps of 100-250 W depending on the GPU.

[Solarscaler]

Thanks for the replies everyone - food for thought there.

The power changes can be quite dramatic and fast - so a perfect fitting solution is rather demanding. For the most part it looks like I'll need to be creative in a solution that will "iron out" the fast changes with either using the grid with lower profitability or batteries. As I mentioned I will look into the battery equation with mining as a variable. In a purely electricity use scenario, batteries didn't make economic sense.

Scaling ASIC miners with their higher efficiency though clunky might give the best result whereas the GPU solution may be more elegant but in the end wont deliver as much?

I'll let you know how I go,
cheers.

[miner29]

Well if you have a way to read the excess power avilable in machine format then maybe a small rasberry pi could be made to monitor the power and control which units are turned on.  Then should be easy to script a simple loop to check excess power and a set of rules to handle which units are on at what point.  But should be dosble.  Maybe set the time it checks adjusts what on to 5 / 10 / 15mins so you arent constantly up / down.  The pieces exist just gotta bring them together.  What a nice problem to have.

[joaogti36]

u need something like this
https://www.sma.de/en/home/systematic-intelligent-energy-management.html

[miniero]

u need something like this
https://www.sma.de/en/home/systematic-intelligent-energy-management.html

Yes, this should be a good solution: Plugging Miners to smart plugs, and letting them serially switch on and off when enough power is available. A battery will help to avoid turning it on and off too fast. But of course this will be an investment.

[leitch]

I am new to solar and I recently read Portable solar panels for rv and benefited a lot.Therefore, I purchased the product in the hope that this would lead to independent and clean energy.

[StormHawk]

I use solar power here too, though countries might be different, my setup is 3500 watts from 8am to 5pm in the evening, my two rigs consumes 1400 watt from wall and I leave the rest power to fill up my power bank ( batteries ), the sun might go down in a minute but its always around 2000watt and after a minute it picks again, always leave extra power behind to avoid random shut down and also for charging battery backups.

[maggus]

great idea!

i was searching for sth similar.

in the wintertime it might be good to increase solar power system to a max (for heating, and so on)

but the spare power in the summer time is huge then.

so there is no harm in powering on and of an asic?


a software solution would be more elegant ... so to throttle the single gpus?!

i will keep reading here! ;-)