That thread has gotten literally no love and a report :(

I thought it was some really interesting speculation

The basic idea being that the widespread installation of renewable energy sources (like solar panels, wind, etc) will lead to the grid's load being out of sync with it's generation

so during noontime on a sunny day (for example), the power being generated in total exceeds the grid's capacity to consume it

Leading to temporary negative power pricing

this is already happening, but the frequency at the moment is so low that there's not enough incentive to design industries around it, but with solar panels getting more efficient / cheaper / widespread, we could experience sustained periods of negative energy prices that are effective to arbitrage by usually cost-inefficient processes

We already had negative oil prices this year, not surprised

The article mentioned dummy loads and cost-inefficient processes like desalination, but my mind immediately went to cryptocurrency mining

still a "dummy load"

is mining 'dummy'?

its a load that generates something

im not sure calling it a dummy load is appropriate

from thermodynamics point of view, it is :D

so all computers are dummy loads too

even servers being used for practical purposes?

That feels like an awfully broad definition of a dummy load

that's a philosophical question. All computers just produce heat in the end

I think defining a dummy load as such is so broad as to make the term useless

this is the case when the process is more important than the end result

which makes me reject that definition

for some people, that has always been the vision acpropulsion.com/index.php/news-med…n-tzero-the-godfather-of-modern-evs

the original idea behind the tchnology that went into the Tesla was to create a smart grid

EVs plugged into mains would soak up excess solar energy during the day

and feed it back at night

obviously any bank of batteries could do the same thing, but if you had millions of EVs in use, it would be decentralized capacity and all that other good stuff

minimal wear&tear on any individual car/battery

burning excess power into crypto mining is no different for solar than it is for the hydro power in China

except thta it doesn't need to be as geographically centralized any more

but if there's a practical way to store the power (batteries, molten salt tanks, whatever) then it's smarter to save the power for night time demand

in general of course, night time/off-peak demand is much much lower than daytime/peak

so you can still burn off a good chunk of it if you want to

yeah, the excess energy -> crypto storage is underway. Saw something on reddit some dude that works at a nat gas power plant was able to install btc mining farm onsight to sop up excess energy

Clearly this all calls for a Dyson sphere.

Then instead of pools DoSing each other, we'll get actual star wars.

cypherpunk-turned-death-star-proponent

we could just build a ringworld first, no need to go full sphere

and yeah, most oil rigs are also major sources of natural gas, which goes unused and is just burnt off

too expensive to capture and transport it, so it's just wasted

if you switched to on-site power generation and crypto mining, it would prob pay for itself too