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New York Power Companies Can Now Charge Bitcoin Miners More (arstechnica.com)
Last Wednesday, the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC) ruled that municipal power companies could charge higher electricity rates to cryptocurrency miners who try to benefit from the state's abundance of cheap hydroelectric power. Ars Technica reports: Over the years, Bitcoin's soaring price has drawn entrepreneurs to mining. Bitcoin mining enterprises have become massive endeavors, consuming megawatts of power on some grids. To minimize the cost of that considerable power draw, mining companies have tried to site their operations in towns with cheap electricity, both in the U.S. and around the world. In the U.S., regions with the cheapest energy tend to be small towns with hydroelectric power. But mining booms in small U.S. towns are not always met with approval. A group of 36 municipal power authorities in northern and western New York petitioned the PSC for permission to raise electricity rates for cryptocurrency miners because their excessive power use has been taxing very small local grids and causing rates to rise for other customers. The PSC responded on Wednesday that it would allow those local power companies to raise rates for cryptocurrency miners. The response noted that New York's local power companies, which are customer-owned and range in size from 1.5 MW to 122 MW, "acquire low-cost power, typically hydro, and distribute the power to customers at no profit." If a community consumes more than what has been acquired, cost increases are passed on to all customers. "In Plattsburgh, for example, monthly bills for average residential customers increased nearly $10 in January because of the two cryptocurrency companies operating there," the PSC document says. The city of Plattsburgh, New York has since imposed an 18-month moratorium on commercial cryptocurrency mining to "protect and enhance the city's natural, historic, cultural and electrical resources."
They should have to install and maintain enough solar panels to cover their mining in order to get out of this charge.
That's not going to happen. It's not even remotely cost effective. These people go for places with hydro because hydro is ridiculously cheap once installed.
Solar is expensive. In comparison to hydro right near the dam, extremely expensive.
What makes you think gentrification only happens to non white folk? No need to get racist about it.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Current cryptocurrency is uselss. Unbound computer work for reward is a fundamentally flawed concept. Cryptographic blockchains should be run for maximum possible efficiency, the distributed proof of transfer suffers nothing from being efficient. In fact it gains from it, making cryptocurrencies easier and faster to run. But they aren't designed that way, they're all designed for an gigantically unnecessary amount of compute power to be thrown at them until such time as the amount of electricity and hardware they use is equal to the reward they put out, despite the low, slow amount of transfers they manage.
Cryptocurrencies need to become actual currency, not artificial investment tools that produce nothing of significant value while wasting valuable power and hardware.
Keep in mind that the only thing that is really happening here is that only a fixed amount of electricity is available each month at subsidized pricing rates. The only change here is that crypto miners get lowest priority of subsidized power. For example, lets say that every month the city gets 40 gWh of subsidized electricity from their contract with the power company that permitted the construction of a hydro dam within city limits. On a given month, lets say the residential and non-crypto mining industrial buildings in the city use 35 gWh of power, and the miners use 15 gWh. In this scenario, the miners will get 5 gWh at the subsidized rates, but will have to pay regular price on the remaining 10 gWh past the city's quota of subsidized power.
Seems pretty reasonable to me... the miners still get access to some cheap power, so its better than what they would get elsewhere, but at the same time the consequences of their excessive power consumption doesn't end up forcing the residential customers of the city to buy a percentage of their power at full price, which was what happened previously.
Wasting energy to participate in a pyramid scheme is not a basic need.
Neither is watching porn or playing video games.
Just cut/cap their power supply.
Or maybe power companies should not be policing morality. As long as I pay my bill, what I do with the power is none of their concern.
I did not know how far this would go.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
> Or maybe power companies should not be policing morality.
It's not about morality. It's about contracts: the city council often has a contract with the power company to supply cheaper energy to its inhabitants in exchange for dam building permission, right of way, etc. That makes sense, since the city's job is to do exactly that. But the amount of power granted this way is naturally capped, that makes sense too (for the power company).
Wise up before emptying your neolib bowels all over the place. That stinks.
And when they'll add powewalls, the situation will become even more interesting!
You insensitive electrical clods!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
It depends on how much baking bread and pizza the mining resembles. There's this thing where electric companies monitor kWh amounts from month to month, per business and residence, and charge accordingly. Electricity on a particular grid is a finite resource, and sudden spikes in usage get billed accordingly.
My suspicion based on the summary talking about "towns with cheap electricity" is that miners were expecting to go unnoticed in residential areas while consuming commercial levels of electricity. The summary talks about a jump in costs to residential customers, and cryptomining is pretty squarely a commercial activity.
Long story short: It probably looked exactly like people opened up a bunch of commercial endeavors and thought they were going to only be charged residential rates. Residential neighbors don't like subsidizing one another involuntarily.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure most municipalities have some form of business licensing. So if you're running a bakery, they know because you put that on your license.
How do you think law enforcement catch growers? Why do you think illegal growers setup generators to avoid being detected? A decent mining rig will consume quite a bit more electricity than a typical business. There are many researchers that got grants to build clusters for research that literally can't build the system they described in their grant proposal. the increase in cost of memory and video cards and lack of supply isn't a joke.
The crypto miners are using over 1000X more power than the standard home. No household cannabis crop is going to use that much power. FTFA, one miner used 33% of the power for the entire town.
And if you actually read the PSC rule, they didn't increase the rates for cryptominers. They increased the rates for heavy users:
"To mitigate the impact on existing customers, the Commission will allow municipal power authorities to create a new tariff focusing on high-density load customers that do not qualify for economic development assistance and have a maximum demand exceeding 300 kW and a load density that exceeds 250 kWh per square foot per year, a usage amount far higher than traditional commercial customers."
http://www3.dps.ny.gov/pscweb/WebFileRoom.nsf/Web/52BF38680307E75E85258251006476F0/$File/pr18018.pdf?OpenElement
My house uses about 4 kWh/ft^2 per year. The rule applies to people using 60 times that. No electrical heating (household or weed) will match that.
From the new PSC rule:
"To mitigate the impact on existing customers, the Commission will allow municipal power authorities to create a new tariff focusing on high-density load customers that do not qualify for economic development assistance and have a maximum demand exceeding 300 kW and a load density that exceeds 250 kWh per square foot per year, a usage amount far higher than traditional commercial customers."
http://www3.dps.ny.gov/pscweb/WebFileRoom.nsf/Web/52BF38680307E75E85258251006476F0/$File/pr18018.pdf?OpenElement
Heavy non-industrial users were getting same rates as households. Not anymore.
Miner will move their business elsewhere where they are welcome. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
You know what's funny? Here in my 3rd world country, I could apply for Industrial power, pay an installation tax for 380V power and then mine away as much as I desire, while paying FAR LESS per KW/h than a home user would.
I guess 'murica has it backwards...
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I'm right there with them and feel those communities' pains. I hope th...
New York has since imposed an 18-month moratorium...to "protect and enhance the city's natural, historic, cultural and electrical resources.
Wtf, politicians! Now I want the miners to win >:-(
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You know what's funny? Here in my 3rd world country, I could apply for Industrial power, pay an installation tax for 380V power and then mine away as much as I desire, while paying FAR LESS per KW/h than a home user would.
I guess 'murica has it backwards...
America is mostly like that too. I think we should be going the opposite direction though. I think we should stop giving bulk discounts for electricity or maybe even charge more for electricity to heavy users. If we are really concerned with conservation, charging that same if not more for energy usage to heavy users would help reduce the demand for fossil fuels where it matters.
You could think about it for ten seconds? Or you could read the article?
If your bakery does that then you get the higher rates. If your crypto mining doesn't then you don't.
What is even more bizarre in y opinion is the way my utility has a base rate and then 5 tiers for residential. The base is quite cheap and you gett 500KWH/mo at that rate. Then a significant bump for 500-1000, another from 1000-1500, ... Churches get a break, and then super big industrials get a break. Middle size biz gets a screw. Power pricing has become like taxes, the whim of politicians.
I don't know if crypto currencies have value. I know generating your own power does have value. Go for it.
I'm surprised that's not already happening. The profit margins for mining crypto are so thin now that you basically need "free" power for the math to work out in your favor.
Never will. And never have.
This isn't even in the top 100 "reasons one should not live in new york."
This isn't really anything new. Power companies do this all the time. Electrons for irrigation are different than those used for residences.
Here's a link to my power co-op's rates.
Now, if you want cheap power, go to Grant County in Washington...the Public Utility District there owns two hydroelectric dams, so electricity is cheap AND plentiful. (hint: that's a big reason Microsoft went there, followed quickly by Yahoo. Then eBay, and Intuit, Microsoft again...but I digress)
It's the original anti net neutrality (sort of).
There is not really anything bizarre about that. The utility knows what the base residential usage is, and they know what the big industrial usage is/will be (by contract). That allows them to pre-buy fuel, plan generating capacity, etc to cover that usage. The 'high usage' residentials are a big unknown, and unknowns are expensive.
"charging that same if not more for energy usage to heavy users would help reduce the demand for fossil fuels where it matters."
Only it wouldn't. It would increase the price of the end product, that's all.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
I think its a reasoned response, but unfortunately I see them then skirting the issue just by dividing the mining load across more accounts. Put up a bunch of sheds and register each as a different account, etc.
not a basic need.
Neither is watching porn
Watch it there, buddy. You are treading in dangerous territory.
Have gnu, will travel.
meanwhile Venture capitalists say "hold my drink"
I would classify this as spatial arbitrage, or perhaps regulatory arbitrage if they were taking advantage of the way power was supplied to large consumers during certain times.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
And in this case, they make no sense whatsoever, duh.
Negative. Expensive even after installed. You still need to maintain, and you still need to deal with intermittent supply as it's unfit for base load.
Hydro once installed is incredibly cheap. Very low maintenance, and so stable that it can even be used as spinning reserve in addition to base load.
Except the city can predict every home's usage based on weather and prior usage. They even show your prior usage by month for the past year on every bill. Nope, at least for austin it is totally about guiding your usage to what they think you should use, 500KWH/mo year round. Now the Nat Gas supplier on the other hand charges a flat rate and gives a slight tweak to the rate based on weather normalization, or the exact opposite of what the electric company does. When the winter is warm, rate is bumped slightly up as usage will be low. When the winter is cold, rate is bumped down as usage is high.
Huge server farms of automated trading, suck up tons of power ... will these rising rates apply to them, too ?
Unless you take into account scarcity. Prices are still high because supply can't keep up with demand and the GPU manufacturers hesitate to increase supply because the crypto craze might end soon.
If you just charge them more for the electricity than they can make mining cryptocurrency with the electricity, then they'll go away -- problem solved! I still curious why the bitcoin miners don't locate where the electricity is the absolute cheapest.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Even then it takes about a year to amortize the cost of the equipment -- provided the value doesn't drop in that time. Unless you're using the mning equipment to also heat your house, it doesn't really make sense (I spend about $160/month heating my house with all-electric anyway).
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Now they're charging my hydroponic grow operation a lot more! (And mining is probably generating a lot of false positive for the investigators looking for grow operations.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Heavy non-industrial users were getting same rates as households.
What you quoted doesn't say that. It refers to "traditional commercial customers".
This is the right way to do it, and shame on the summary author for lying about the actual rules. It shouldn't be earth-shattering news that a power company has high rates for heavy users. Why didn't the cities and the PSC consider this when they implemented the rates in the beginning? If aluminum smelting was a more portable operation, they probably would have triggered this response decades ago.
Building your own dam is prohibitously expensive also, if you're a single user. So moving in after it's already built to take advantage of cheaper rates is just mooching off of the taxpayers.
a Russian conservatard? really?
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
It's kind of a problem, since the energy production of the Earth is finite, and pollution affects everyone. If a rich person goes to an impoverished village during a drought and buys up all the grain, and burns it, actually, it is many people's concern.
Libertarianism is great and all when there are infinite resources.
"charging that same if not more for energy usage to heavy users would help reduce the demand for fossil fuels where it matters."
Only it wouldn't. It would increase the price of the end product, that's all.
You're assuming that the heavy users are all factories. The person with a 6k sqft house generally uses more energy than the person with a 3k sqft house who uses more than the person with a 1k sqft house. Just like when gas prices go up demand for large vehicles go down, if utilities went up for larger houses then the demand for larger houses would go down and demand for more energy efficiency would go up.
Home users are home users, no matter the size of the home. Having them pay differently is discriminating.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Home users are home users, no matter the size of the home. Having them pay differently is discriminating.
In most places they already pay differently. They pay less per kwh. We shouldn't be giving a discount for wasting more energy. We don't do that for gas and there are a ton of situations like taxes where we have rich paying more. What you tax you get less of. I would much rather see us tax energy usage than income. This would also solve the whole millionaire paying less taxes because his income is from investments. We should tax consumption of finite resources not income.
So.... People using the power they are paying for pay extra because they are using the power they are paying for? They like going to the supermarket for apples. They are $1 each. But you want 1,000 apples. Bulk discount, right? Appareny not. They charge you *more* for each apple, using this logic.
Only boring people are ever bored.
Depends on where you are. Some places require businesses to buy power from the power company because they could generate power for far less than the Government can. So sometimes they can run it for say a day or 3 days... sometimes certain days a month. Some places don't care, run it all you want. Depends on how the local government is. They can be real assholes or they can be very useful. Where I am they seem to be useful, so far.
They're talking about household power, however. That's a big deal with all the electric cars coming on the grid too. I figure a lot of places will need a heavy-upgrade soon to handle it. Some of the American infrastructure is around 100 years old, or more. The original Tesla/Westinghouse lines. Probably most of it is over 50 years old and they never imagined this kind of a drain on power.
Neither is posting on Slashdot a "basic need".
In the words of Eddie Valient, "Everybody's got to have a hobby."
They happen to have picked a hobby that, at least for the moment, pays for itself, and then some.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Then you build the fish bypass corridor, which is frankly a good idea to do regardless as it enables fishing-related economic activity upstream, and you remain as profitable as before after the costs are sunk as fish corridor requires almost no maintenance once in place.