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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: 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.