this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
359 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
59207 readers
3158 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't know about this specific case but it's a common practice to have big consumers be on specific agreements with national grid so they can be shut off on demand to ensure the grid integrity. The companies are compensated for the inconvenience in exchange for their flexibility. Usually it's with heavy industries like metal, paper and glass manufacturers.
My knowledge is specific to TVA, but I was privy to such an agreement that a Cryptominer I worked for had.
The Local Utility Provider would bill the company for their usage, but they did not provide the rate. TVA did because of the amount of electricity. This rate is much cheaper than the Utility Provider offers residential customers; economies of scale as well as the inability to store this amount of power meaning it's "wasted" otherwise. Whenever there is a period of intense usage TVA would provide a 30 minute notice. After the 30 minutes were up the rate provided to us (industry) would more than quadruple, and was actually quite a bit above the residential rate. Residential customers are entirely exempt from this. Your rate, is your rate, is your rate.
The effect of the above meant that it was a mad scramble to shut everything offline whenever we got notice. Otherwise we were losing money. Regular industry trudged along because their bottom line doesn't care if their power rate quadrupled for 3 hours a dozen days out of the year. It's not that big a deal.
I definitely got to see the sausage being made, and it's opened up my mind to some of the ignorance around crypto mining. If anything it drove me further away from being interested in it as anything more than a neat tech demonstration that people figured they could trade.