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posted by janrinok on Saturday June 23 2018, @09:01AM   Printer-friendly
from the cost-of-making-money dept.

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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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Aiwendil on Saturday June 23 2018, @11:31PM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Saturday June 23 2018, @11:31PM (#697382) Journal

    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.

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