Gamechanger: Chinese Buying Really, Really Cheap Electricity From Australia Using Bitcoin -- May 2, 2018

See this post from earlier this year:

This was posted on the blog just a few weeks ago:

One bitcoin transaction now uses as much energy as your house in a week -- Motherboard, November 1, 2017. Bitbcoin's surge in price has sent its electricity consumption soaring.

Bitcoin mining guzzles energy -- and its carbon footprint just keeps growing -- Wired, December 6, 2017. Bitcoin is slowing the effort to achieve a rapid transition away from fossil fuels. What’s more, this is just the beginning. Given its rapidly growing climate footprint, bitcoin is a malignant development, and it’s getting worse.

Now this.

Don sent me this link the other day. This is a huge, huge story, but for reasons not mentioned in the article. I will come back to this later, but think about the ramifications of this.

Chinese Bitcoin miners are reopening the Hunter Valley coal power station called Redbank in NSW. They have a deal that gets around our gargantuan, mismanaged grid by buying coal power direct for 8c/kWh, while Australians in the same place pay 28c/kWh.

This is exactly the nightmare the head of the Australian Energy Management Organisation (AEMO) spoke of just last week — that “big players could abandon the grid”. That’s a degenerate spiral leaving a shrinking pool of suckers to pay for the inefficient, bird-killing, blackout prone, witchdoctor grid.

Consumers there pay, on average, $A0.28 ($0.22) per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for electricity. But Hunter Energy, which owns Redbank, are offering the crypto miners electricity at a fraction of the cost. The “first-of-its-kind” deal, as the Age puts it, will see the crypto miners pay only A$0.08 per kWh in the day and A$0.05 per kWh at night. Hunter Energy told the Age that the price is feasible because the electricity produced at the coal power plant would go straight to the crypto miners, bypassing—and thus, presumably, avoiding the costs of using—the grid. (Quartz has reached out to Hunter Energy for a comment.)

This tells everyone all they need to know about “cheap” renewables. Eight cents is the big-commercial retail rate of coal powered reliable electricity in Australia, and anything else is nuts.

The cheap deal will mainly apply to those close to the plant (near Singleton) because building long transmission lines is too expensive. Any day now, the large smelters in NSW will start adding up the cost of either relocating or building a transmission line.

It’s not surprising that this comes from crypto industry first. It must be one of the most transportable high-electricity-need industries there is.