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Not necessarily.
Solar has a problem where, if you install enough capacity to meet demand during short, overcast winter days, you have twice the capacity you need in spring or autumn, and 4 times as much capacity as you need during long, clear summer days.
That excess production tanks the value of the power produced. Itnis already regularly driving power prices negative, making it impossible to recoup the value of your installation. Since it's cheaper for you to just buy electricity on the market than to install solar, you don't install solar. Nobody does. Solar installation never expands enough to meet winter demand.
Unless we can monetize that cheap summer power. If we have some way of profitably consuming that excess power, we have every reason to maximize solar rollout.
Crypto can do that just as well as anything else.
yeah well unfortunately techno bro fascists/crypto bros aren’t exactly the most progressive minds, and let me tell you: they are fucking hostile to renewables.
And before you start lecturing me about how it’s about the tech or whatever, let me also tell you: I was mining literally over a decade ago. I know what crypto is, I know what mining is, and I know how this shit works. It is concretely unsustainable and back asswards, as I said. It will not be what the evangelists tell you. It’s been 15 years. It’s a casino, it’s a desperate attempt at getting rich because people are losing faith in traditional economic mobility (rightfully so).
Remember when everyone was all about Argentina’s grand experiment? Fucking crickets now.
The issue is monetizing the excess power produced by adequately-sized solar facilities for 9 months out of the year. Getting enough people to point giant lasers into space would solve the overcapacity problem that comes with solar generation outside of the tropics. Crypto has a slightly higher ROI.
Desalination, fischer-tropsch synfuel production, hydrogen electrolysis, demand-shaping of conventional industries like steel production and aluminum smelting, widespread adoption of electrified parking garages are some other options. Even other maligned, power-hungry technologies like AI can address the overproduction problems of solar better than conventional grid-scale storage solutions.
Man it’s amazing how every 5 years there’s a new solution that doesn’t solve it.
You having a bad day? What can I do to make your life better?
Fair enough. I was flippant with you, turnabout is fair play.
Anyway, I just think ultimately this whole enterprise doesn’t make sense so long as the majority of cryptos depend on a system that requires more and more computing power the more people get involved. The math is simple here to me, you disagree.
Have a good one
I'm not trying to solve any problems with Crypto. I'm trying to use their purchasing of electricity to solve a different problem: seasonal variation in solar production.
Due to long, clear, summer days, and short, cloudy winter days, if you have enough solar panels to meet your demand in winter, you have about 400% of what you need to meet demand in the summer, even after accounting for air conditioning loads.
That excess power on the grid crashes the price of power. Unless you can find someone else to buy it, or some way tonuse it. To have enough solar generation capacity to meet your needs year round, you need something that can suck up excess power in the summer. If you can't monetize that excess, you'll never be able to get enough solar online to meet demand year-round.
Storage can conceivably address daily fluctuations, but it won't solve seasonal variation.