Solar wind and hydro
Solar panels that tilt to follow the angle of the sun do have a motor that will have wear and tear for example.
Wind you covered. It’s better not to run than run at negative prices.
Hydro has other complexities, especially with pondage capacity. Lots of moving pieces.
Renewable is far more complex than what we hear on many podcasts to be frank.
A very tiny % of solar panels are mechanized. That whole idea has mostly been obsoleted by increasingly cheap solar panels.
Hydro obviously isn't worth running at exceptionally low prices in most cases as most hydro involves water storage –not run of the river – so it's better to use the water later. But hydro is usually dispatchable, so I didn't even mention it as it's really not in the same category as solar or wind.
That said, even with hydro sometimes they'll run hydro plants for long periods at negatives prices. IIRC an example of this maybe a decade or so ago was a Quebec dam where so much rain had fallen they they needed to dump it through the turbines even though they'd pushed electricity prices negative, as it was cheaper to pay that price than have to use (and then repair) the emergency spillways (mechanically, the turbines had to have an electrical load on them or they'd overspeed).
There are always exceptions for small periods of time in a year, in a day, etc. for free power.
However, the miners I talk with want high availability (95%+) to deploy their ASICs, not intermittent free power. Building the mine is too costly to run at 5%-10% of the time (negative prices or prices lower than transmission, etc.) is a very low frequency for our fleet at least.
To be clear, in the thread you are replying to I was clear that renewables _may_ be used for hashing significantly during low cost periods, _in the future _. I'm not claiming that's a significant thing yet.
Right now the #1 renewable used for Bitcoin mining is probably still stranded hydro.
I was not referring to any of your other treads
I was just answering this specific tread.
Renewable Energy is my daily reality. I agree that stranded hydro is the best use case but it’s not as common as miners would want and more than generators like…
