Replying to Avatar Daniel Batten

When wind farms do not do bitcoin mining with their surplus energy, they waste a lot of energy and money.

Because of this, when the turbines reach end of life they do not get repowered.

Because of this there, the asset is wasted and that power must start coming from thermal sources again.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/australias-oldest-commercial-wind-farm-to-close-as-cost-of-repowering-is-too-high/

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Garrettstr 🌸 11mo ago

Can confirm. When I was managing the market operations for a large IPP, we were losing around $60-$80MM/year in economic curtailment, i.e. stranded energy. And that was including the PTC and REC adders.

I spent my last 3-4 years at that company developing a behind the meter bitcoin mining pilot project, but ultimately BAML did not give approval for the onsite use of energy for bitcoin mining due to internal push back, so the project pivoted to Cloud Compute/HPC. I think it will be built this year, but I left about a year and a half ago because a recruiter reached out asking if I was interested in leading the power markets team for a bitcoin miner.

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Garrettstr 🌸 11mo ago

The conversation I had with BAML’s VP of Tax Equity in NY was dystopian and broke my heart. He literally said, “you cannot use any power onsite for the use of computers intended to produce cryptocurrency.”

Even when I explained to him that this would push forward BAML’s TE flip-date, and their ownership beyond that would be more valueable, they wouldn’t have it. They wanted to tell us what was, and what was not, okay for us to use power for.