Originally published at: See inside this US's largest Bitcoin mining operation. It's in Texas, natch. | Boing Boing
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excuse me but does that place have its own goddamn substation?
There have got to be better things we could be using that much electricity for.
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I just got ths urge to buy an armed drone. Anyone know where you can get one?
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Late stage capitalism, at its most absurd.
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You wouldn’t even need to do that.
Silica gel is cheap. And it expands a lot when it sucks up water.
They’re pulling their cooling supply from a lake a mile away. I doubt they’re keeping a close eye on that… Just keep shoveling it in the pipe until their tanks are full. Repeat if they ever manage to clean it all out.
Or if you can get your hands on some Polyisocyanide you can inject that. Their cooling walls will be, to put it scientifically, completely fucked. The hotter it gets, the stronger it gets. And you have to cool that stuff to get it to melt. Not gonna happen in Texas.
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What, you mean like keeping kids and elderly folks alive during bad weather? That’s just un-murican.
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Can we at least put some of that waste heat to good use, like desalination plants, heating communities, something other than contributing to global warming?
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I feel like either one of two things will happen: ERCOT will start gouging them when all the mining operations combined consume too much power and/or start turning a real profit because they can, or they will cause the Texas grid to collapse and a whole lot of people will learn a lesson.
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So dramatic. Why not take a page from Mike Ehrmantraut and just “accidentally” release some Mylar balloons next to their substation?
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Soooo… any connection between mining stations like this and the power grid disaster TX had this past winter?
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The real answer? Reclosers. The circuit breakers in a substation are designed to deal with this kind of fault, or more likely a tree limb/bird/wind. They will reset after a fault and only stay open if the fault is persistent. With that kind of energy, few things other than a downed line are capable of being a persistent fault.
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Where is the fun in that? I want to see some pretty explosions.
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Texas north wants in on the action
When pressed about their environmental impact these bitcoin miners just say “we’ll figure it out later”, failing to realize that there won’t really be a later if we don’t act now.
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The Substation was probably originally built for the now decaying aluminum plant down the road. Smelting aluminum takes a lot of electricity.
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Not Rockland. Rockdale.
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Oh I know. Smelting Al uses about 15 MW/hr per ton. Each miner hall is going to draw 100MW, 24/7.
That substation might not be big enough.
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Decades from now, when the miserable outcomes of the climate emergency are affecting the majority of Americans on a daily basis, the people who ran these operations should be viewed by historians as sociopaths and criminals.
Outside Austin, most Texans don’t have a great record of learning such lessons.
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I was gonna mention that…
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Throwing electrically conductive chaff over the substation may do the trick
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There is one way that is known to take down Bitcoin mining. Just send the following out into the interwebs…
I sold all my Bitcoin.
– Elon Musk
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