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.
(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.