Something on the lines of if your company facility is using over X amount of energy the majority of that has to be from a green source such as solar power. What would happen and is this feasible or am I totally thinking about this wrong
Edit: Good responses from everyone, my point in asking this was completely hypothetical, ignoring how hard it would be to implement a restriction. My own thoughts are that requiring the use of renewable energy for high electricity products could help spur the demand for it as now it’s a requirement. Of course companies would fight back, they want money
There is a caveat to this. It’s been a few years since I read the article, but oftentimes the reason Bitcoin miners run on renewables is because they set up shop in places that have established local cheap electricity.
The example in the article was a town with ideal geography for hydro power, to the point electricity was cheap enough to sell it to the next town over. Crypto-miners set up in the first town and quickly began using more power, driving up the cost and eventually causing serious issues for the second town as there wasn’t enough electricity leftover to send their way anymore.
I’m no fan of Bitcoin, but often the energy they use from hydro plants is energy that would literally be wasted otherwise. A hydro dam can’t control how much water is entering the reservoir, so if there’s more water entering the reservoir than is needed to generate electricity for the current demand then the dam will need to just throw the extra water away. Trying to transmit the electricty to remote markets can be an alternative, but that costs resources too and isn’t always practical.
I dug up the original article: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/03/09/bitcoin-mining-energy-prices-smalltown-feature-217230/
In this case, they already were exporting 80% of the hydro-energy generated, about enough to power Los Angeles in 2018 when it was written. Maybe there are some cases for your suggestion on a small scale, but if a site is generating enough excess electricity to make mining worthwhile, why would it be less worthwhile to connect it to a larger grid?
The hydro plant for my city doesn’t even have a reservoir. It’s just on a river that flows down a mountain. And 99.999% of the water doesn’t go through any turbines.
Having said that - it doesn’t produce enough power for the city, let alone spare to be wasted on other things.
I’ve read different stories. Of towns where cheap and renewable electricity can be made but it’s financially not viable especially at the start. So Bitcoin miners were used to sell the excess energy and that made the project possible. In a way something like Bitcoin can create a global price/demand for electricity which can have its advantages like I mentioned or disadvantages like you mentioned.
I’ll concede there’s probably something to miners footing the initial capital to build the infrastructure, and if it’s in a remote area it may be prohibitively expensive for public utilities to extend the grid to it. But mining setups still require high internet speed connections to use the network, and I just have to wonder if installing that is a better use of resources than installing power lines to take some load off non-renewable power sources.
