
Wind energy used to mine cryptocurrency to fund climate research - kawera
https://julianoliver.com/output/harvest
======
jessriedel
The interesting abstract idea here is to use excess power capacity during the
night or windy periods in given region for computing applications (like mining
or high-latency cloud computing) where geography is irrelevant. This is a cool
strategy for arbitraging away one of the biggest problems with renewable
energy sources (intermittency). And it should only get more effective as the
ratio of power society devotes to computation vs. physical use (heating,
cooling, etc.) increases. Not sure why I'd never heard of it before.

(The application of the earned money to funding climate research is basically
unrelated.)

EDIT: Maybe not. I'm getting article with conflicting estimates for future
growth, but this study

[https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/united-states-data-
center-e...](https://eta.lbl.gov/publications/united-states-data-center-
energy)

suggests that data center energy use has recently slowed dramatically, to just
4% per year. Very surprising to me.

~~~
detaro
Bunch of aligning trends reducing energy usage in recent times, will be
interesting to see if it keeps up. (more virtualization means less machines,
strong push towards efficiency in both computing and cooling, especially among
the big DC operators, trend towards Cloud computing means more computation
happens in those high-efficiency DCs instead of smaller, inefficient setups)

The only big examples of "high-latency" computing I can think of have been
these volunteer distributed projects (BOINC, SETI), but maybe there's a
commercial angle for that as well?

~~~
closeparen
What makes the "cloud" data-centers energy efficient? Just oversubscription of
VMs to hosts? Can't most datacenter-operating businesses do that with their
vSphere installations?

Or is there something about the actual power distribution, machines, cooling,
etc?

~~~
allenz
Both. First, the largest data centers have developed virtualization platforms
that are significantly more efficient than vSphere. A major factor is that
they provide fine-grained billing for compute, storage, etc instead of selling
VMs, which allows them to optimize more effectively. Amazon can provide high-
latency Glacier storage or spot instances for spare compute at very low cost.

Second, they optimize physical cooling and power distribution thoroughly.
Google has an overhead of just 12%. Here's a good overview of what they do:
[https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal...](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/efficiency/internal/)

~~~
hueving
>First, the largest data centers have developed virtualization platforms that
are significantly more efficient than vSphere.

This needs a citation. One of the issues with AWS/etc is that they don't know
the usage pattern of a customer that allocates a VM. A well managed vSphere
system can be heavily oversubscribed with mostly idle VMs that don't need high
performance.

~~~
jononor
On a PaaS like Heroku where dynos are statefree and short-lived, don't need to
allocate CPU/RAM/HDD for a contiously-running VM. And scaling running dynos
can be done automatically. We did this based on work to-be-done (message queue
length), with scaling decisions taken every 20 seconds. Many parts of system
had no dynos running as the default, only when needed.

With a function-as-a-service type computational model like Lambda, it becomes
even more fine grained.

~~~
hueving
True, but the vast majority of cloud computing is still just VMs.

~~~
jononor
Yes, for now. The trend is (and has been) towards more and more elasticity.
And since there are economic incentives on both platform provider and buyer
side, I believe this will continue. It is somewhat predicated on tooling and
programming models continuing to improve alongside. Because for many smaller
projects/businesses, compute costs are dwarfed by engineering costs.

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wallace_f
It is worthwhile to note that by 2010 the GAO estimated over 100billion in
total federal dollars on climate spending[1]. This number doesn't include
other nation's spending, or private spending.

By contrast, Skylab's entire program cost was about 10 billion in 2010
dollars.

It's naive to think bureaucratic inertia is not a problem in climate change.
In other words, it is not free of one of the problems the War on Poverty and
War on Drugs saw: that they became industries focused on preserving themselves
rather than ever fixing the problems they were meant to.

Whenever we spend our own money to fix problems that affect us, we consider
the opportunity costs carefully. But when the collection plate is passed to us
and we want to demonstrate virtue, our money is given into the hands of people
who have a reward system that is not ideally suited to using it
altruistically.

Is more money going to solve the climate crisis? Is there a better way, such
as political reform? If not, I'd just like to be honest about how many manned
missions to Mars we are passing up on to instead pay for this.

I know people say that "people will die from climate change," but people are
dying. We have people even here in the USA without access to clean drinking
water, basic healthcare, or safe neighborhoods to live in. Around the globe
people die from malnutrition while the world produces a surplus of food.
People don't die in 2017 because of a lack of tech or resources, they die
because of politics and greed, or maybe even from one of the 26,000 bombs we
dropped last year.

1-[https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/08/23/the-
alarmi...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/08/23/the-alarming-
cost-of-climate-change-hysteria/)
2-[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab)

~~~
losteric
Climate change is a mind-bogglingly large-scale problem. We've known that for
decades, fossil fuels was energy expenditures that accrued debt for short-term
growth... it's not going to be cheap to fix.

Actual wars are a better place to look - the US has been spending an average
of $300B/y on war in the Middle East for a cause that kills next to no one.
Cut backs on war would more than pay for all our healthcare, space
exploration, and climate change needs.

~~~
wallace_f
I agree that our wars need to be either cut back or shut down. If you're
interested, Rand Paul is actually putting up a fight in the senate for that
right now.

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fencepost
This has always seemed to me like an obvious setup for anyone with enough
solar capacity to routinely run a surplus - particularly in states where the
local utilities have purchased legislative support for near-punituve
connection charges or effectively zero rates for anyone interested in selling
surplus power back into the grid.

Edit: Not an outdoor setup but a setup to use all electricity surplus to
regular needs for mining instead.

~~~
mhh__
How does that compare to selling the excess power then putting the money into
a (let's say) index fund? I have no data right now, so I don't have the
answer.

~~~
detaro
Parent explicitly talks about situations in which you can't just sell your
excess power.

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alphydan
The siting of the tubine is indeed art. It will produce close to nothing at
that height as air slows down near the ground due to friction. That's why
turbines try to be located as high as possible (usually in a trade-off between
cost of the tower and revenue from more wind).

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c3534l
This is like the Euler's identity of Silicon Valley buzzwords.

~~~
spookyuser
It's the most _2017_ article I've ever read.

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icebraining
Reminds me of "Google Will Eat Itself"
([http://www.gwei.org/](http://www.gwei.org/)).

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alexasmyths
'crypto-currency' is an accounting treatment, it's not 'value creation'.

There's no net-value created by doing the 'mining part' \- in fact, it's a
value-destroying activity.

Why waste electricity doing nothing?

Generate electricity that others can use, sell that, and pay for research.

~~~
rwallace
On the contrary, mining does create value, by creating a demand for computing
power therefore financing the development of more advanced lithography, one of
the very few areas in which our species is still making substantial progress.

Now if they were getting the electricity by burning coal, a case could be made
that the environmental harm outweighs the benefit. But getting it from a
renewable source also expands the economies of scale on that renewable source
just a little more, so it's a win across the board.

~~~
cvsh
>On the contrary, mining does create value, by creating a demand for computing
power therefore financing the development of more advanced lithography

This is like saying hurricanes create value because they create demand for
construction

~~~
danblick
Or Frederic Bastiat's "Candlemaker's Petition", which was a satirical request
that officials block out the sun in order "to encourage industry and stimulate
employment".

[http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html](http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html)

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gaius
This seems a very roundabout way to do things - climate modelling is CPU-
intensive enough already, why not use the wind energy to power _those_
computations instead of this extra step in the middle?

~~~
kens
It's an art project. The idea isn't to efficiently create money but to be
thought-provoking.

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x2398dh1
What is the cost per watt hour of this setup when all of the electrical
hardware is factored in?

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antoncnc
At the end, 100% of the wind energy is heating the air. Just think about it.

~~~
ndr
How? And how much more than not using wind in such a way?

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noja
Generating huge amounts of waste heat in the process.

