We, the homeowners, are made to pay more for the electricity we did not get during Winter Storm Uri, but the Greg Abbott donors received millions for shutting down their power consumption.
Datacenters are already said to represent at least 4.4 percent of electricity consumption in the US, and this is expanding rapidly thanks to trends such as demand for AI-related services. A recent report [PDF] from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) estimates that datacenter energy consumption will grow to between 6.7 and 12 percent of the total by 2028.
As The Register reported last year, some Americans could face a 70 percent hike in electricity bills by 2030 unless action is taken to boost energy capacity in response to rising demand from all those bit barns.
The short-term impact is likely to be a rise in energy prices across the board, according to energy market intelligence firm Argus.
The Bitcoin miners were paid tens of millions to halt their electrical use during Uri and, more recently, during the 2021 heatwave.
As a bitcoin mining enterprise, Riot Platforms runs thousands of computers in the energy-guzzling pursuit of minting digital currency. Recently, however, the company got big bucks from Texas to lower the mining operation’s electricity usage.
Riot said on Wednesday that the state’s power grid operator paid the company $31.7 million in energy credits in August — or roughly $22 million more than the value of the bitcoin it mined that month — to cut its energy consumption during a record-breaking heatwave in the state.
We have the most corrupt political system in the world, and politicians are becoming rich while many of us struggle with day-to-day expenses.