4WD
$50 site donor 2025
Wonder the percentage of sparrows … still no shortage …
The scam continues: Why wind turbines are being re-powered at 10-years
- Thread starter OVERKILL
- Start date
No one is mandating cat ownership……..
And if a number is thrown out on Google, be very skeptical.
Ok, So you stick with your facts and I'll do otherwise.
4WD
$50 site donor 2025
Starlings learned jacking with my Purple Martins is hazardous
It’s a complicated story, but I feel compelled to share it.
A buddy of mine is employed to repair/refurb/maintain wind farms. He’s as busy as he wants to be, though giving that he is with a “contractor” firm, he gets to turn down business whenever it suits him. irrelevant, though I would say he is not starving, nor overly “exploited.” In fact, it seems he is in his own little cat bird seat, though the work is physically hard, and often in the least desirable places at the least desirable times…so he should be well compensated.
The story is that one wind farm…in Texas…had a bunch of trailers or containers or whatever you want to call them chock full of computer servers…I mean chock full. What for, you ask??? …Crypto mining, it turns out. Yep. he did some power estimates and concluded nearly half the capacity of the wind farm went to power the crypto mine. The crypto mine was owned by the private owner of the wind farm. Meanwhile, Texas politicians were crowing about how they had figured out how to solve Texas’ power crunch, publicly bragging about welcoming crypto miners into the state.
so, there was probably a lot of federal subsidy for building the wind farm, and then some state subsidy building the crypto mining facilities. And/or perhaps politicians were “board members, “partners,” or “shareholders” of these “arrangements.” So it’s true, in a pinch, the crypto operation is supposed to scale back usage in favor of supplying the grid, so maybe this was an innovative way to solve this problem of meeting uneven demand, but it was with a lot of “Texas good old boy support.” So I shrug when TX politicians complain about wind energy. They can say one thing from the ”bully pulpit,” while profiting from the very thing they bash. Follow the money.
unrelated, I shoot for 3 yr electrical contracts. 3 yrs ago I got a “killer deal“ on supposedly 100% solar. A month ago, it expired, and the rate I had was nowhere to be found; that company wanted ~3x that price to renew. So I switched (again) to a different company. To a name I didn’t associate with electricity…Shell Energy…complete with the normal Shell logo…and wouldn’t you know it, 100% renewable. Don’t know this time if wind, or hydro, or solar, but 100% renewable. Of course the electrons in my powerline don’t know where they came from, but it beats the 9% or 0% renewable some companies were offering. It means Shell somehow funded some sort of renewable source. And it was still a very competitive price compared to the big normal players here…like half.
gosh, do you think Shell was getting subsidies???
A buddy of mine is employed to repair/refurb/maintain wind farms. He’s as busy as he wants to be, though giving that he is with a “contractor” firm, he gets to turn down business whenever it suits him. irrelevant, though I would say he is not starving, nor overly “exploited.” In fact, it seems he is in his own little cat bird seat, though the work is physically hard, and often in the least desirable places at the least desirable times…so he should be well compensated.
The story is that one wind farm…in Texas…had a bunch of trailers or containers or whatever you want to call them chock full of computer servers…I mean chock full. What for, you ask??? …Crypto mining, it turns out. Yep. he did some power estimates and concluded nearly half the capacity of the wind farm went to power the crypto mine. The crypto mine was owned by the private owner of the wind farm. Meanwhile, Texas politicians were crowing about how they had figured out how to solve Texas’ power crunch, publicly bragging about welcoming crypto miners into the state.
so, there was probably a lot of federal subsidy for building the wind farm, and then some state subsidy building the crypto mining facilities. And/or perhaps politicians were “board members, “partners,” or “shareholders” of these “arrangements.” So it’s true, in a pinch, the crypto operation is supposed to scale back usage in favor of supplying the grid, so maybe this was an innovative way to solve this problem of meeting uneven demand, but it was with a lot of “Texas good old boy support.” So I shrug when TX politicians complain about wind energy. They can say one thing from the ”bully pulpit,” while profiting from the very thing they bash. Follow the money.
unrelated, I shoot for 3 yr electrical contracts. 3 yrs ago I got a “killer deal“ on supposedly 100% solar. A month ago, it expired, and the rate I had was nowhere to be found; that company wanted ~3x that price to renew. So I switched (again) to a different company. To a name I didn’t associate with electricity…Shell Energy…complete with the normal Shell logo…and wouldn’t you know it, 100% renewable. Don’t know this time if wind, or hydro, or solar, but 100% renewable. Of course the electrons in my powerline don’t know where they came from, but it beats the 9% or 0% renewable some companies were offering. It means Shell somehow funded some sort of renewable source. And it was still a very competitive price compared to the big normal players here…like half.
gosh, do you think Shell was getting subsidies???
MolaKule
Staff member
This is neither an objective nor fair response.
I actually read and study scientific papers.
Kind of related but on the natural gas side. I just got an email from my utility offering to “offset” my natural gas usage with “renewable natural gas sources and carbon offsets.” It’s between an extra $0.075 and $0.30 per therm on top of the regular cost of gas depending on how much you want to offset. What a joke.
Like I posted before time to buy Honest Travs carbon offset credits. Pay me $20 a month and I will personally plant something in my neighbors backyard in the middle of the night. You sleep good knowing you have no carbon footprint, I have a good little side gig and my neighbor gets to play with his new cordless weed whacker.
4WD
$50 site donor 2025
Those are worldwide - Crypto eats up outrageous power … Albeit some claim they use what would be wasted power ?It’s a complicated story, but I feel compelled to share it.
A buddy of mine is employed to repair/refurb/maintain wind farms. He’s as busy as he wants to be, though giving that he is with a “contractor” firm, he gets to turn down business whenever it suits him. irrelevant, though I would say he is not starving, nor overly “exploited.” In fact, it seems he is in his own little cat bird seat, though the work is physically hard, and often in the least desirable places at the least desirable times…so he should be well compensated.
The story is that one wind farm…in Texas…had a bunch of trailers or containers or whatever you want to call them chock full of computer servers…I mean chock full. What for, you ask??? …Crypto mining, it turns out. Yep. he did some power estimates and concluded nearly half the capacity of the wind farm went to power the crypto mine. The crypto mine was owned by the private owner of the wind farm. Meanwhile, Texas politicians were crowing about how they had figured out how to solve Texas’ power crunch, publicly bragging about welcoming crypto miners into the state.
so, there was probably a lot of federal subsidy for building the wind farm, and then some state subsidy building the crypto mining facilities. And/or perhaps politicians were “board members, “partners,” or “shareholders” of these “arrangements.” So it’s true, in a pinch, the crypto operation is supposed to scale back usage in favor of supplying the grid, so maybe this was an innovative way to solve this problem of meeting uneven demand, but it was with a lot of “Texas good old boy support.” So I shrug when TX politicians complain about wind energy. They can say one thing from the ”bully pulpit,” while profiting from the very thing they bash. Follow the money.
unrelated, I shoot for 3 yr electrical contracts. 3 yrs ago I got a “killer deal“ on supposedly 100% solar. A month ago, it expired, and the rate I had was nowhere to be found; that company wanted ~3x that price to renew. So I switched (again) to a different company. To a name I didn’t associate with electricity…Shell Energy…complete with the normal Shell logo…and wouldn’t you know it, 100% renewable. Don’t know this time if wind, or hydro, or solar, but 100% renewable. Of course the electrons in my powerline don’t know where they came from, but it beats the 9% or 0% renewable some companies were offering. It means Shell somehow funded some sort of renewable source. And it was still a very competitive price compared to the big normal players here…like half.
gosh, do you think Shell was getting subsidies???
4WD
$50 site donor 2025
I don’t think large fixed batteries make sense … obviously an EV needs the battery/minerals - but we are headed into a crazy amount of surface extraction and competition if fixed batteries become the norm …
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4WD
$50 site donor 2025
Speaking of that… my wife posted in our family group chat this, and you can see my response… but I’m using a Husqvarna 2 stroke
The zero turn is also really good at taking out knee height trees
OVERKILL
$100 Site Donor 2021
Yes, there are all kinds of alternative battery technologies being floated right now but the only one being invested in at scale is lithium, which is extremely expensive. We'll see how these other techs pan out over the next few years.
The problem with most storage is that it's hours of capacity to deal with demand that can often be weeks in duration (wind lulls; dunkelflaute) or even seasonal. Wind in many locations is extremely seasonal with peak performance in the spring and fall and vanishing during cold snaps and during the summer. You aren't solving that with a few hours of storage.
On top of that, storage adds significantly to the round-trip cost, particularly as you scale it, because this stuff doesn't generate anything and has considerable CAPEX and is also lossy. Nobody is building it for free, so ratepayers are ultimately on the hook.
Gravity batteries are a joke. PHES is quite viable (we have several successful examples like Racoon Mountain) but it's also expensive and limited in capacity. It's fine to be used for peaking capacity replacement when paired to firm sources but it's not economically (nor logistically I suspect) doing so for sources that are gone for days or weeks.
all this encouraged me to read up a bit more on this. On one hand, crypto mining represents a “scalable” load, can’t remember the exact phrase they used, but crypto use can “near-instantly” be shut down or shut off, if other grid uses need more juice, or scaled back up if there is slack in the usage. Thats the good news. and it is good news. The bad news is 1) the incredible heat generation (which in general Texas definitely doesn’t need), 2) these farms either create their own electricity, perhaps subsidized (to the point of this thread), or have lucrative low-cost per KWh contracts, but get a gigantic credit from (???) whenever they cut back usage. They are paid per kWh for scaling back. OK concept, but abused in practice. Foul. The article I read said they buy at $0.02-0.03, and “sell back“ at $9.00 with the credits. That’s not right man. That is taxpayer subsidy. As I poorly pointed out, rates today are waaay higher than they were 3 yrs ago. I was lucky again to secure a 38% higher rate than 3 yrs ago. I know there has been general inflation, but I cant help shake the notion our higher rates are paying certain operators to make a killing on their wind, solar, or whatever farms as they get further subsidised to use up much of that capacity to make money on crypto…their “side hustle.”
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4WD
$50 site donor 2025
And then when your whole world is digital … and you don’t control much
Got it - so the source isn't important so long as it's published in a publication I prefer to read. Political think tanks, etc... are all equal and have no ulterior motive then, correct? Left or right?
I merely pointed out who wrote the article, their admitted bias, and the fact their record isn't the best in the business. I'd do the same if someone posted a liberal think tank puff piece with no context as well.
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