This paper is hard to follow and seems wrong-headed enough that I'm not seriously going to try. Any load that converts electricity into money is a useful source of revenue, but money is not energy...
Exemplary
This paper is hard to follow and seems wrong-headed enough that I'm not seriously going to try. Any load that converts electricity into money is a useful source of revenue, but money is not energy storage, and treating financial assets as energy storage obfuscates things. Let me walk though what's really going on:
The electricity market can be counterintuitive because we are used to commodities that can be stored, so a surplus doesn't get wasted. But surplus electricity is more like the market for fresh local fruit in season. The price will be low, maybe even free. Harvests are traditionally a time of temporary, local abundance of foods that don't store well.
This local abundance can be seen as a problem for the fruit tree owners (they don't get paid as much) and/or an opportunity for anyone who can figure out how to take advantage of it. Prices will tend to equalize as people figure out how to put a surplus to better use.
For electricity production, a temporary, local abundance can happen due to lack of a grid connection. Or in some cases, there is a grid connection, but sometimes it's maxed out: there is more solar power than the grid connection can handle on a sunny summer day, or more hydro power during the spring.
Customers are a common source of funding for businesses. Local cryptocurrency miners can serve as an especially useful early customer for electricity producers because they don't require a maxed-out or nonexistent grid connection. The advantages of selling electricity to miners are that they can move quickly, they can work anywhere, they don't care all that much about reliability, and they can pay.
This can be socially beneficial, provided that what they're funding is beneficial. Solar farms are useful things.
But there will likely be competition from alternative ways of putting that surplus to good use. As battery technology improves, having actual storage allows maxed-out grid connections to also be used in the evenings and at night. Or, maybe grid capacity will improve. Or, maybe some of the other suggestions people have made will work?
Eventually the surplus should go away. In the meantime, early customers are a way for an electricity producer to get extra revenue.
An especially weird thing about using cryptocurrency as "storage" is that, typically, businesses are spending money on the business, not on other investments. Cryptocurrency mining, cryptocurrency speculation, and electricity production are alternative, competing investments that tie up funds. An electricity producer will need some short-term working capital, but speculating with that money doesn't make a lot of sense. (Well, maybe it does for a true believer.)
This is cool, but wouldn’t it be better to have azure/gcp/AWS locate some data centers there to do actual useful work instead? I remember an article about using a data center to heat a pool. That...
This is cool, but wouldn’t it be better to have azure/gcp/AWS locate some data centers there to do actual useful work instead? I remember an article about using a data center to heat a pool. That was just as efficient as resistive electric heat and did useful work besides.
This seems to be an extremely roundabout way of saying "we use 'excess' energy to earn money, to pay for energy when the renewables aren't producing." Presumably those data centers spinning down...
This seems to be an extremely roundabout way of saying "we use 'excess' energy to earn money, to pay for energy when the renewables aren't producing." Presumably those data centers spinning down would be bad.
It's "virtual energy storage", which is to say it's not storing energy at all.
If the goal of the 'microgrid' is to earn money without impacting a country's electrical grid, I guess this is a way to do it. If the goal of the 'microgrid' is to produce and store energy, more traditional methods that actually store energy are needed.
Honestly the name sounds more like a scam than anything.
Agreed. As someone who has at least a passing interest in technology and uses of cryptocurrency, this paper is the type of apparent misrepresentation among even scholars which seriously turns me...
Agreed. As someone who has at least a passing interest in technology and uses of cryptocurrency, this paper is the type of apparent misrepresentation among even scholars which seriously turns me off of the topic.
[This paper] proposes a structure to store excess renewable energy in cryptocurrency units (CCUs) like Bitcoin (BTC). [Cryptocurrency energy storage systems] can be charged during off-peak intervals and, conversely, they discharge during high-demand periods to reduce the overall operational cost of [micro grids].
Calling this an energy storage system and that it can be discharged later is extremely disingenuous. The energy expended on the cryptocurrency cannot be retrieved. It's not being "stored" for later any more than it is in a multitude of processes from which the energy cannot be recovered (steel processing, food manufacturing, data center operation, water desalination, carbon capture, etc.)
The output of the operation (i.e. the cryptocurrency) might be used to pay to import energy later, but that is energy someone else must generate.
Can't help but suspect that this is crypto people adopting the language of environmentalism to promote themselves, the same way they were all into "helping the third world access banking" a few...
Can't help but suspect that this is crypto people adopting the language of environmentalism to promote themselves, the same way they were all into "helping the third world access banking" a few years ago.
That's exactly what it is. I'll give them one thing, marketing through the publishing of "scientific" papers is crafty. I hate to see the heading of "science" becoming increasingly cynical.
That's exactly what it is. I'll give them one thing, marketing through the publishing of "scientific" papers is crafty.
I hate to see the heading of "science" becoming increasingly cynical.
I once had a very laborious conversation with a crypto fan trying to pitch his governance-token-based DAO as "cyber anarchism". I'm no anarchist myself but I made a polite, pointless effort to...
I once had a very laborious conversation with a crypto fan trying to pitch his governance-token-based DAO as "cyber anarchism". I'm no anarchist myself but I made a polite, pointless effort to explain that anarchists are never going to go for a system where people get more votes depending on how many tokens they own.
This was in a solarpunk forum two years ago so they were probably an early warning of this pseudo-environmentalist branding we're seeing now.
Per International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems: Study shows Microgrids (MGs) not using Bitcoin Mining waste large amounts of renewable energy, but MGs using Bitcoin Mining stops...
Per International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems:
Study shows Microgrids (MGs) not using Bitcoin Mining waste large amounts of renewable energy, but MGs using Bitcoin Mining stops almost all renewable energy curtailment waste and reduces operating cost by 46%.
Bitcoin mining wastes energy either way. This moves some of the bitcoin to the MG, but the savings are illusory on a whole system perspective. It simply redistributes the waste as all global miner...
Bitcoin mining wastes energy either way. This moves some of the bitcoin to the MG, but the savings are illusory on a whole system perspective. It simply redistributes the waste as all global miner efficiency drops. This is environmentally horrifying.
Bitcoin mining is a great way to deincentivize stuff like brute-force password cracking and DDoS attacks. Pretty much anything other than hard proof-of-work doesn't work in the same way though.
Bitcoin mining is a great way to deincentivize stuff like brute-force password cracking and DDoS attacks. Pretty much anything other than hard proof-of-work doesn't work in the same way though.
Crypto as "virtual energy storage" is an onion article. I won't repeat all the reasons why since we did a thread like this not long ago.
This paper is hard to follow and seems wrong-headed enough that I'm not seriously going to try. Any load that converts electricity into money is a useful source of revenue, but money is not energy storage, and treating financial assets as energy storage obfuscates things. Let me walk though what's really going on:
The electricity market can be counterintuitive because we are used to commodities that can be stored, so a surplus doesn't get wasted. But surplus electricity is more like the market for fresh local fruit in season. The price will be low, maybe even free. Harvests are traditionally a time of temporary, local abundance of foods that don't store well.
This local abundance can be seen as a problem for the fruit tree owners (they don't get paid as much) and/or an opportunity for anyone who can figure out how to take advantage of it. Prices will tend to equalize as people figure out how to put a surplus to better use.
For electricity production, a temporary, local abundance can happen due to lack of a grid connection. Or in some cases, there is a grid connection, but sometimes it's maxed out: there is more solar power than the grid connection can handle on a sunny summer day, or more hydro power during the spring.
Customers are a common source of funding for businesses. Local cryptocurrency miners can serve as an especially useful early customer for electricity producers because they don't require a maxed-out or nonexistent grid connection. The advantages of selling electricity to miners are that they can move quickly, they can work anywhere, they don't care all that much about reliability, and they can pay.
This can be socially beneficial, provided that what they're funding is beneficial. Solar farms are useful things.
But there will likely be competition from alternative ways of putting that surplus to good use. As battery technology improves, having actual storage allows maxed-out grid connections to also be used in the evenings and at night. Or, maybe grid capacity will improve. Or, maybe some of the other suggestions people have made will work?
Eventually the surplus should go away. In the meantime, early customers are a way for an electricity producer to get extra revenue.
An especially weird thing about using cryptocurrency as "storage" is that, typically, businesses are spending money on the business, not on other investments. Cryptocurrency mining, cryptocurrency speculation, and electricity production are alternative, competing investments that tie up funds. An electricity producer will need some short-term working capital, but speculating with that money doesn't make a lot of sense. (Well, maybe it does for a true believer.)
This is cool, but wouldn’t it be better to have azure/gcp/AWS locate some data centers there to do actual useful work instead? I remember an article about using a data center to heat a pool. That was just as efficient as resistive electric heat and did useful work besides.
This seems to be an extremely roundabout way of saying "we use 'excess' energy to earn money, to pay for energy when the renewables aren't producing." Presumably those data centers spinning down would be bad.
It's "virtual energy storage", which is to say it's not storing energy at all.
If the goal of the 'microgrid' is to earn money without impacting a country's electrical grid, I guess this is a way to do it. If the goal of the 'microgrid' is to produce and store energy, more traditional methods that actually store energy are needed.
Honestly the name sounds more like a scam than anything.
Agreed. As someone who has at least a passing interest in technology and uses of cryptocurrency, this paper is the type of apparent misrepresentation among even scholars which seriously turns me off of the topic.
Calling this an energy storage system and that it can be discharged later is extremely disingenuous. The energy expended on the cryptocurrency cannot be retrieved. It's not being "stored" for later any more than it is in a multitude of processes from which the energy cannot be recovered (steel processing, food manufacturing, data center operation, water desalination, carbon capture, etc.)
The output of the operation (i.e. the cryptocurrency) might be used to pay to import energy later, but that is energy someone else must generate.
Can't help but suspect that this is crypto people adopting the language of environmentalism to promote themselves, the same way they were all into "helping the third world access banking" a few years ago.
That's exactly what it is. I'll give them one thing, marketing through the publishing of "scientific" papers is crafty.
I hate to see the heading of "science" becoming increasingly cynical.
I once had a very laborious conversation with a crypto fan trying to pitch his governance-token-based DAO as "cyber anarchism". I'm no anarchist myself but I made a polite, pointless effort to explain that anarchists are never going to go for a system where people get more votes depending on how many tokens they own.
This was in a solarpunk forum two years ago so they were probably an early warning of this pseudo-environmentalist branding we're seeing now.
Per International Journal of Electrical Power and Energy Systems:
Study shows Microgrids (MGs) not using Bitcoin Mining waste large amounts of renewable energy, but MGs using Bitcoin Mining stops almost all renewable energy curtailment waste and reduces operating cost by 46%.
Bitcoin mining wastes energy either way. This moves some of the bitcoin to the MG, but the savings are illusory on a whole system perspective. It simply redistributes the waste as all global miner efficiency drops. This is environmentally horrifying.
Bitcoin mining is a great way to deincentivize stuff like brute-force password cracking and DDoS attacks. Pretty much anything other than hard proof-of-work doesn't work in the same way though.