A very tiny % of solar panels are mechanized. That whole idea has mostly been obsoleted by increasingly cheap solar panels. Hydro obviously isn't worth running at exceptionally low prices in most cases as most hydro involves water storage –not run of the river – so it's better to use the water later. But hydro is usually dispatchable, so I didn't even mention it as it's really not in the same category as solar or wind. That said, even with hydro sometimes they'll run hydro plants for long periods at negatives prices. IIRC an example of this maybe a decade or so ago was a Quebec dam where so much rain had fallen they they needed to dump it through the turbines even though they'd pushed electricity prices negative, as it was cheaper to pay that price than have to use (and then repair) the emergency spillways (mechanically, the turbines had to have an electrical load on them or they'd overspeed).

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PL's avatar
PL 1 year ago
There are always exceptions for small periods of time in a year, in a day, etc. for free power. However, the miners I talk with want high availability (95%+) to deploy their ASICs, not intermittent free power. Building the mine is too costly to run at 5%-10% of the time (negative prices or prices lower than transmission, etc.) is a very low frequency for our fleet at least.
To be clear, in the thread you are replying to I was clear that renewables _may_ be used for hashing significantly during low cost periods, _in the future _. I'm not claiming that's a significant thing yet. Right now the #1 renewable used for Bitcoin mining is probably still stranded hydro.
Peter Todd's avatar Peter Todd
Yup. Unfortunately FPPS is a really valuable product for many hashers. Variance matters when you have bills to pay. It's possible that increased usage of renewables helps change this, as then at least hashers won't be paying power bills. But a lot of them will still have used debt to fund their other costs...
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