This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Something topic-adjacent is going down in BC, Canada right now.
We had a large timber company that branched out into crypto mining, augmented with solar. They made an absolute killing with this pivot, and wanted to expand. But need a metric fuck-ton of electricity. The local utility company denied them, citing their own issues with keeping up with demand in the near future. The timber company sued them, and I think it settled to this:
Super interesting story - thanks for sharing. Helps getting perspective:
> the data centres proposed by Conifex would have consumed 2.5 million
> megawatt-hours of electricity a year. That’s enough to power and heat
> more than 570,000 apartments
Tax the greenhouse effect from the energy production, UBI to give people the money to afford what they need.
Trying to moralize every action on the market is a losing game though. I mean is this, the fediverse, worth the energy, are games, streaming, plant lights for your indoor plants?
It's better to leave that to be individuals choices but make sure that the cost of the consequences are on the individual making the choices.
The bigger operations already are using so called green energy. There are large operations in the north west where hydro is abundant and cheap.
This might be a few years off but I am considering setting up a farm where I am. We are planning on a very large solar installation at some point in the near future and we will probably have way more supply than we can use. I wouldn't mine btc but running some other algo hardware and throwing it at nicehash or other smart pools would probably be a good use of that power assuming I can get the hardware cheap enough.
No one with any working braincells is running larger than at home operations on standard power costs in most of the country. My state has some of the lowest cost power in the US and it's still not profitable to mine most coins and it doesn't get much better with commercial rates. I'd also bet that the larger AI farms will also do what they can to run on solar, wind, etc so that they pay as little as possible for power.
That would actually not do anything.
So there’s this stupid thing called carbon capture right? It’s where instead of putting money into useful things there’s these companies that use a lot of resources on machines that take CO2 out of the atmosphere. The companies claim that they use “green” energy, but it doesn’t. As earmarked as that may be these machines still just use grid energy, which still uses fossil fuels. All it does is take some capacity to replace fossil fuels from green energy.
