Post
Topic
Board Mining speculation
Re: Mining and Solar Electricity
by
Swordsoffreedom
on 02/04/2014, 22:44:01 UTC
Hi.  I need some experienced mining folks to give me some feedback.  I work for one of the largest residential solar installers in Arizona and we are also in California.  Our cash payment customers are getting their electricity between $0.04 and $0.06/kWh.  There's been a trend in solar to "oversize" systems by 20-30%.  By this i mean, if a customer is using 10,000 kWh/yr they may purchase a system that's generating between 12,000 and 13,000 kWh/yr.  Personally, I don't like to oversize systems because the "extra" electricity is sold back to the utility company at the end of the year at "wholesale" rates (read: less than what they are paying for the electricity).  It occurred to me that bitcoin mining may be a great way to go for some of these homeowners.  For example:  Over the course of a year the PV system overproduces 2,000 kWh of electricity.  As opposed to selling that electricity back to the utility company at say $0.04/kWh it may be better to drop off a "bit coin rig" at the customers house that's capable of using up the extra 2,000 kWh in the course of say a week.

Questions:
Is it feasible to install a rig of that size at someones home?
How many coins would it likely mint?
From your experience mining bitcoins would profit sharing with the home owner be preferable to say $0.07/ kWh?
Considering hardware costs, is this even a worthwhile endeavor?

It can be feasible the problem is that as difficulty rises profits invariably fall so they will need to upgrade their hardware every few months to maximize the profitability of doing so

That said free electricity and a miner can beat selling it back to the system.

As for coins minted depends on the hashing power