Nuclear for sure is one of the slowest… Like brown coal it’s part of the baseload power plants…
… bitcoin mining stabilises by ‘usually burning tons of energy’ and stopping to burn the moment it’s more profitable to sell the electricity than to mine bitcoin… Yes it would have stabilised… Using the same energy to e.g. Create hydrogen (and pausing doing it when the grid needs energy and prices go high) would have the same effect just without the energy waste the rest of the day…
Electric cars being used as energy buffers and paid well for feeding back energy when demand is high would have solved the issue too…
Or a large house full of light bulbs that can be turned off anytime…
Praising bitcoin for stabilising the grid by being a dumpable load looks very weird to me…
Yes, there may be other ways in the future, and batteries sound like part of the solution. I’m not an expert on this topic but it seems to me bitcoin mining is increasingly being used for grid stabilising, using excess energy from renewables to help return on investment and incentivise renewable adoption.
It’s so absurd… Just using it to heat up some water in houses again would ofc require the houses to have the ability to know and accept energy… Having fridges cool down the inside a bit more than really needed… Loading some batteries that aren’t completely full atm… Laptops… An oven doing pyrolysis just because energy is there and it needs cleaning… A dish washer starting up even though it’s half empty… Industrial machines cranking up the speed which is less efficient but still more output…
There really must be ways to use energy if you tried to ‘solve that issue’… But ofc the other options all require many people to take part in it… Mining and selling energy +dropping load can be done by a singled guy
Trying to coordinate those places that need it is very difficult and at the power scale bitcoin miners can.
There is also plenty of unused energy that is too expensive to build the infrastructure to use it on the grid. Bitcoin miners can easily come to the source of the energy. Gas flares is one when oil mining, also building plants like hydro energy can mine bitcoin in new areas until infrastructure has been built to get it to homes. There is a company called Gridless in Africa which is helping get electricity to remote villages by mining bitcoin to make it profitable to build hydro plants, and other types of power plants.
yeah - centrally managed for sure … it would need to be a marketplace and machines would just need to autonomously be part of it and buy/sell capacity …
…the larger issue most certainly is over here that it would never pay to take part in this game as a home user … even at negative electricity prices as a home user you’d be forced to pay the grid fees which are ~20Cent (okay that wasn’t 100% correct - 11.5cent grid fees + 8 cent taxes and stuff) over here …
anyway - nice there’s cases where mining does good to the people
EVs are huge mobile batteries on wheels too. Plugging millions of those suckers into the grid with vehicle to grid mode could make a huge difference.
Hell, even getting home batteries on new builds is probably cost effective now too.
Just need the billing/paying system to catch up with the technology available.
Either that or folks will start going off grid more and more. 10 kw of panels, 40 kwh of house batteries, 80 kwh of car batteries… that can go a long way, when an average house only uses 10kwh per day.
Its not that its a logo but what the man can do with it for the chick. Him the sensitive man who thinks of the chick’s happiness
here we pump water uphill for storage, to use hydro when peak demand hits.
Yes, praising a energy hog sounds more like that Prof has a more than passing interest in Bitcoin. Or this was just a case of him being asked if bitcoin mining could have fixed it and he answered it without comment on better ways to solved the issue or negative effects.
This also has the same issue as wind/solar. Relies on inverters to generate the AC and needs to sync with the grid so its no solution to that particular problem of the recent outage.
Eventually they will have a system, out of band signalling if you will, where the inverters can sync without wholly relying on the 50/60Hz of the grid its feeding into.
Well… You wouldn’t build an EV charger with passive diods but would always go for IGBTs or power mosfets or something like that… And as soon as the rectifier is built from active components it can be used as dc ac converter too… (and for efficient and good ac dc conversion without emitting capacitive/inductive load to the grid it will detect the current/voltage phases anyway too… The Renault zoe even uses the inverter that drives the engine to load the battery and doesn’t have an additional dedicated inverter for charging (that’s why it comes with pretty good ac loading rates in relation to cost) ) So with EVs it’s more a matter of will than a matter of technological capability…
… Every local battery store for buffering your solar energy does precisely that anyway…
… I didn’t read into the specifics of the outage reasons but I’m pretty confident it simply dropping load solves the issue grid attached batteries would have done the job too (if they/their usage would have been designed with this goal in mind… You can’t really save on hardware when you remove the the dc ac conversion capability… )
… Anyway … As long as this feedback is not properly focused on and considered (and sufficiently rewarded/enforced) there won’t be an incentive to do it (just as bitcoin won’t solve the issue its way unless market conditions are right)
None of it will be built well if not built via market forces. Capitalism is required as real capital investment is needed for long term profitability. So much of this is driven by subsidies, which provides an inverted incentive for short term profits, malinvestments, and hence crappy infrastructure.
The issue is that the energy market has nothing to do with free market at all… The grid fees are being set high enough for the grid builders/runners to cover their cost (whatever those cost are…), energy suppliers get guaranteed prices and guaranteed infeed amounts (for those prices… No matter if regenerative, coal, gas or nuclear…)
I’m all for mainly gridless and a little regulated market where you can get/sell the energy you cannot cover locally/have in excess… We have the technology… Drop the AC nonsense, go for dc grid and make it attractive for people to produce and consume their own energy decentralized instead of having those large energy producers that need expensive infrastructure to get the energy to the consumer again… Grid fees are more than production cost per Kwh solar… And taxes on top are the same cost again… So 3x local production cost… Hard to believe we couldn’t go for over capacity +battery with the result of being cheaper overall…
That is not the point. It will behave like a solar system or a wind farm (produce DC for transmission to central inverter station).
The battery system with its inverter still requires the power network to provide a waveform to sync to.
This is apparently what happened in that blackout. There was not enough inertia in the power grid to cause all these inverters (solar, wind, battery) to reliably sync to and eventually different parts of the power grid where out of sync and caused breakers to trip
Eventually there will be needs for a “out of band” signal for future inverters to use for sync along with the grid. A dual system.
This allows the future inverters to also provide an inertia since they will all be attempting to keep the grid synced with this outside signal. It will act like any massive generator would and that is attempt to keep the grid in sync with itself while it too is syncing with the grid. A dance if you will.
Interesting post here, nominally about Discord and the opportunity that its inevitable demise will bring for the right alternative chat/community app.
I’ll be surprised if there isn’t a chat app selected for IF, and others will be built using Autonomi regardless.
I think this post should be useful inspiration for those inclined to do so.
I also think it would be helpful for those building Decorum cc @Seneca
It’s not rocket science and quite short, but makes some good points:
One of the dangers though, will be mimicking the old apps rather than going back to the drawing board and figuring out what’s really important.
So not scale for example - that’s vital for VCs, but not for people. If an app serves its purpose well for enough people to have made building it worthwhile, that should be our measure of success, unless you just want to make money of course.
In which case you don’t get the project IMO. If you do, and you want to build great apps, I suggest you scrutinise every feature and design decision and check whether it really serves the people who will be using it or some other idea. Almost everything we use today was built without that being the priority, so let’s not just replicate the same shit on Autonomi.
Do you see the ‘magic’ here? For every dollar given to them, they give you a dollar back, then take the dollar you gave them to buy US Treasuries - and they then earn interest on that. This is 100% inflationary - a doubling of the money.
Tether (USDT); Circle (USDC); Trump’s World Liberty Finance (USD1); & others … all are prepping to grow and eat up the US Treasury market, most likely creating trillions of dollars in new currency and mass inflation over the next decade.
"Tether is also the most profitable stablecoin issuer, logging a net income of nearly $14 billion in 2024.
It earns revenue by accepting US dollars to mint USDt and then investing those dollars into highly liquid, yield-bearing instruments such as US Treasury bills. Still, USDt’s popularity is largely limited to users outside of the United States, where rival stablecoin USDC is dominant."
(just as bitcoin won’t solve the issue its way unless market conditions are right)
