- cross-posted to:
- bitcoin@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- bitcoin@lemmy.world
Without paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20240308161113/https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2024/03/07/why-africa-is-cryptos-next-frontier
They are starting to get it:
Yet many of the continent’s renewable-energy projects are stalled because there are not enough local consumers who are able to buy electricity to make them financially viable. By offering themselves as buyers of last resort, crypto-miners can help to stabilise demand for power and ensure utilities turn a profit. In doing so, they might also incentivise the investment needed to provide electricity to the estimated 600m people in Africa, roughly half its population, who do not have access to power from the grid.
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Miners will only serve as a way to siphon excess power and not make domestic pricing and renewable projects increase in cost right?
Miners pay power companies for energy they couldn’t sell otherwise, which allows the power companies to grow and build local infrastructure. I’m not sure why you fantasize that increasing revenue increases cost, it’s bizarre.
I’m not saying that increasing revenue inherently increases costs, just that it may provide a perverse incentive for power companies to cater to miners in the future rather than cater to locals.
This doesn’t seem to make sense. “Cater to miners” means selling them power, miners flow towards the cheapest power, if locals compete with them for power prices go up and miners want to move their mining rigs to cheaper power sources. Locals currently don’t have any power, there is no electric grid and no infrastructure, revenue from miners is what will get locals connected to the power grid.
Probably mostly, yeah. There may be some relatively minor cost increases as providers test what they can get away with, but ultimately, to my understanding, the biggest expense of a mining op by far is the electricity, and that puts immense downward pressure on what providers can demand from miners. Miners love the idea of helping to stabilize the grid specifically because waste power would otherwise not be sold at all, which means they can get a discount on it. If providers try to screw with the prices too much, it can very quickly become more cost efficient to pack up and move out of the area entirely.
On the providers’ end, it makes a degree of sense not to screw this up even if they could pressure them for more. Being able to guarantee a viable, permanent base load on your grid means you have some degree of stable, guaranteed income to finance operations. A single piece of high end mining hardware pulls over 3 kW of power all by itself, so they can add up quickly. A single large scale mining operation could easily end up in the 1-10 MW range, probably more than that if they really get serious. That isn’t a ton of pull per mining op, but a quick estimate suggests a US city could cover about 1,500 people with 1 MW of power, but they won’t spread that evenly over day and night, so let’s say the spread’s real bad, and they only cover about 500 people during peak hours. Still, in a particularly rural area, that may actually constitute a respectable base load, and it may make a big impact on the economics of expanding into that area.
Of course, companies get greedy, so it’s very plausible that they shoot themselves in the foot by trying to raise prices and running off the miners. My guess is someone’ll try to do it once, get absolutely rekt financially, and everyone will collectively look at that and decide the amount of money they’re getting now isn’t so bad.
Lmao
