One of Canada's largest utilities is planning to make blockchain companies bid for access to electricity.
Hydro Quebec says it will set aside a 500MW block of power that will be reserved for companies that are "using cryptography as applied to blockchain technology." Access to that block will be subject to a bidding process and companies that want to operate their servers and miners will be required to make bids in order to get power.
The starting rate for the bids will be an increase of 1 cent per kilowatt hour above the current price.
The move is an effort by Hydro Quebec to get a handle on an explosion of blockchain related activity (read: cryptocoin mining) that has caused a power crunch in Quebec. The company said earlier this month that it needed to take emergency measures to limit consumption and that "demand exceeds Hydro-Québec’s short and medium-term capacity."
The process will not just be based on how much money companies are willing to spend. Hydro Quebec says it will also consider job implications in the bids, and companies that plan to hire people in Quebec and deliver higher paying jobs (calculated in payroll per MW) will get higher consideration.
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As reported in the Evening Standard, the Bank of International Settlements published an annual report with four criteria to continue economic growth. However, it was rather overshadowed by a statement in the appendix (reported here, here, here, here, here and elsewhere) where cryptographic currency was described as a "combination of a bubble, a Ponzi scheme and an environmental disaster".
I agree and so does a Canadian electricity company.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 23 2018, @10:03AM (6 children)
About ten years ago, the whole world was on the hot seat over an "energy crisis" and "peak oil".
And they sounded SO convincing! Even Warren Buffett and the President of the United States were issuing grave warnings over it.
I fell for it. Even to the point of having financial advisors tell me outright the President, even though he was an oil man, was full of bullshit.
Now, we seem to have energy to burn. Way too much of it. Even to the point of wasting it to generate "proof of waste".
I guess it has become crystal clear that politicians are not to be listened to much when we have something like this happen.
Something like this happen, we just have to get the politician to sign the paper to allow the problem to go away.
If we are going to use energy, I at least want something made using it.
(Score: 3, Touché) by khallow on Saturday June 23 2018, @11:20AM
One could say that the food used to feed you is "proof of waste" as well. We don't have to all agree on the utility of energy use in order for it to be useful.
(Score: 2) by zocalo on Saturday June 23 2018, @03:26PM (2 children)
Same thing with peak oil and climate change; grave warnings, then a lot of work making things more efficient and less reliant on carbon-based fuels (growth in consumption of things like shale oil and natural gas aside), with the result that - despite the mining - we're consuming less energy and emitting less harmful crap into the environment. While there's no way of telling how bad it might be if nobody had bothered to do anything it does seem like a net win, although one that could have been even larger without the crypto mining, so we might as well take it.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday June 23 2018, @04:00PM (1 child)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 24 2018, @02:43AM
Banks and mortgage companies had to deal with dates 20 & 30 years in the future all along. The OS and languages didn't always support dates that far in the future, especially for dates using YY instead of YYYY (thus, Y2K). So they used non-date fields to store these future dates.
Store them as strings, carve them up into year, month & day, and then count days to do date math (counting seconds is great, but that's a bit too fine for tracking mortgages). 30 years worth of days is under 11k, which easily fits into small integers. At least that's how we did it on our PDP-8 in COBOL and FORTRAN.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Saturday June 23 2018, @10:18PM (1 child)
Somewhat the warning actually was true regarding energy use. It has been pretty much constant in the rich world since then (economic crisis does wonders for this), and per capita it actually has decreased in rich world.
(It ballparks roughly at that if it wasn't for the energy-increase per capita in china the world would still be at roughly the same total energy usage level as it was back in 2008 (which in turn only is about 11% higher than it was back in 2000))
That actually is why most grand energy projects (in the rich world) that started 10-15 years ago has failed, since the expected major uptick in usage never materialized (also the breakthroughs in fracking technology and shale oil recovery unlocked immense amounts of energy in north america, which made the rest of the world have a glut of it).
But the warnings, they actually was that the then current increase was unsustainable (despite being lower than it was in the 60s and 70s), which would roughly had equalled another china (and that was before the shale&fracking boom was firmly expected)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 24 2018, @01:29AM
I think it's more that they were wholly unrealistic from a cost/benefit point of view. I think most of them would have failed anyway even with the expected demand increase.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 23 2018, @01:03PM (7 children)
What you do with it is none of their business. You use power, you pay. You use more, you pay more due to extra use. Use too much, you pay for infrastructure upgrades, like any other large power sucking business does.
Next: 'well, you use it for something we dont like, we are cutting you off'. where else you going to go? they have monopolies.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by zocalo on Saturday June 23 2018, @03:39PM (5 children)
Thanks to planning and permits you simply can't upgrade an electricity grid on this scale, even if you wanted to, within the timeframe of the crypto mining boom that Quebec is dealing with. Provided that they are actually working to make up the enery shortfall, this seems like a pretty fair way of ensuring that those that caused the crunch being the ones that get to make up the shortfall in the interim. Besides, if the crypto-mining company is large enough and is willing to be flexible in how many ASICs/GPUs they are running during peak hours, a little negotiation might well open up those more flexible rates above.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 23 2018, @04:52PM (4 children)
If you could read and comprehend simple sentences, you could see that i understand this. My beef is them getting involved *what* you use the power for, not how much. Its none of their business.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday June 23 2018, @07:59PM (3 children)
Contrary to popular opinion, there are some instances where society allocates scarce resources via methods other than price, based on reasons other than simple level of consumption. Welcome to civilization.
Upon demand beyond available supply, the provider usually has government mandated priorities to satisfy. You can't cut power to a hospital, or a port, or even a subdivision of houses just to serve a few high-demand customers who you KNOW to be engaged in non-critical use for personal profit.
So you shed smelters, and similar high demand users first, and you have connection agreements and pricing to allow for this.
They know its a possibility, its in their contract. This is no different than that. No lives are at stake, the fewest people will be inconvenienced, and its all taken care of by contract and expectations.
Further, in this case, its a government run public utility, with a mandate to serve all citizens and voters.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 24 2018, @01:33AM (2 children)
And sometimes societies kill millions of innocent people. Doesn't make it a good idea.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday June 24 2018, @07:12AM (1 child)
What part of limiting crypt miners energy usage kills millions of people?
Or were you just trying to Godwin the thread?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 24 2018, @09:23AM
The idea where if society does it, then it must be a good thing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Saturday June 23 2018, @11:31PM
If they pay more for infrastructure upgrades it will take a year or two to get it up and running, and that is if no new generating stations or interties are needed (if so add at least another 2-8 years). (Even TFS mentions that Quebec does this as a measure for short- to midterm).
Also seems like Quebec has about an annual shortage of about 2TWh to 6TWh/year (that is about 250MWe to 750MWe on average, however about 60% of it is imported in on-peak hours; so they are about 1GW behind already)
And yes, it is the grid operator's business how you use the power, it is the very essence of their business even - frequency control is a cooperating game, if we have enough selfish users with subpar backup then the grid will destabilize and segment off the selfish users.
The "I do whatever I want" only works for small users (up to about a couple MW), the big users play a different ballgame.
Oh, and just a bit of extra fun, currently the neighbouring provice (ontario) can't really supply as much power as normal due to midlife refurbisment of their nuclear reactors (which temporarily will have them reduced by about 900 to 2400MWe until 2025, after that 900MWe until 2033).
So right now investment in new generating capacity is an even dicier game than normal.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 23 2018, @01:30PM (6 children)
So this is what happens when electricity doesn't have its own version of Net Neutrality? I guess the internet doesn't either anymore.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FakeBeldin on Saturday June 23 2018, @05:49PM (5 children)
While I agree with you, I'm not blind to the fact that new companies are sprouting in that area whose energy demands (taken together) are so large that they put delivery at risk.
The obvious question is how to address this. Should the burdens be shared by everyone? That doesn't seem quite fair to the residents.
Should the burden be borne by heavy industry? That doesn't seem quite fair to previous customers - and it's not clear (from the summary) that this would help. It might be one miner starting there, or it could be many miners whose combined load pushes the network beyond its capabilities. So it might hurt large industry (potentially also large employers), while not lowering demand.
Should the residents and the pre-existing industrial customers have some sort of preferred status over the newcoming industry? That's what they're trying here. If you have a better solution, I'd love to hear it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Saturday June 23 2018, @08:08PM (4 children)
This is a solved problem with electric utilities all over the world.
People aren't expected to sit in the dark eating cold cereal just so the smelter down the street can melt scrap steel.
The smelter signed a contract that specifies this. They know a shutdown is possible, and they get rate adjustments for this.
The utilities in this case are just bringing another user under the same system of allocation. Nothing new here, other than the energy use is consumed by One or Two people per mining operation, who's work is low priority in the over all scope of societies energy use.
Price and the ability to pay is not the sole allocation criteria. Especially when the utilities are government run.
This isn't that hard to figure out. Its ALWAYS been this way.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FakeBeldin on Saturday June 23 2018, @08:52PM
That sounds reasonable. It even caused me to read the fine article to see why that wouldn't be the case here.
What is rather absent from the summary is that...
That puts the whole thing in a different light.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 24 2018, @02:03AM (2 children)
Vote buying also gets in the mix. My view is that technology will repeatedly find new ways to exploit the reckless creation of public goods and rent seeking. Most places don't have this problem with cryptocurrency mining, because they don't offer below market electricity. Similarly, most places don't have trouble with ride hailing services like Uber because their taxi services don't have sweet deals or Walmart because their stores don't enjoy rigid oligopolies.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday June 24 2018, @07:20AM (1 child)
Man believes electrical energy generation is a rent seeking exercise. Wow.
Maybe read up on the term?
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday June 24 2018, @09:25AM
It's the other, reckless creation of public goods.