Quote from: larry_vw_1955 on July 25, 2024, 11:44:16 PM

Question: If the noise is so bad, how do the employees of the mining facility make it through the day? Are they all working remotely or something or maybe they wear huge ear muffs??

They do have ear protection. I've seen certain mining facilities where people are required to wear ear protection before entering the farm. This ensures that the employees are not affected by the constant whirring within the facility. This is also mandatory for some datacenters.

Quote from: DaveF on July 25, 2024, 07:44:22 PM

Yes, ERCOT pays people not to mine so people that need it can get it. BUT, [and a lot of places are guilty of this], you should not allow THAT MUCH more possible power pull then could be generated. ConEd in NY had that. When more and more power was being consumed, they just stopped allowing more people to connect until they had the ability to generate more. Then even went out and gave people LED bulbs and lower power appliances so the amount of power needed was lower when it was approaching limits. If you are an internet provider and oversell your service the speed people get goes down. It's a lot tougher to do that with power.

This seems to be a big part of why Texans aren't very fond of mining facilities being built there. However, I would argue ERCOT's strategy might not be as friendly to the residents as it seems.

They are offered a preferential rates as compared to the Texans, and that is okay because they consume massive amount but the discount can be quite egregious when you compare to how much the regular citizens are paying. In fact, cryptominers can be paid to not mine. I believe that several sources and financial reports actually highlights how ERCOT's scheme helped them to turn their losses into a profit.[1]

To quote RIOT, they received 49.3 million in manual curtailment credits, $21.9 million in ERCOT's ability to control their load. Latter of which is also given regardless of the fact that they're power down or not. It's not that I don't agree that utilizing potentially wasted energy to provide to the miners is bad, but I think there are fundamental issues that should've been addressed before. What they can do now is to prove that they're drawing electricity in a sustainable way, but they've successfully filed a court order to prevent that from happening. So much for transparency, and I guess we will never find out now. [2]

Quote from: DaveF on July 25, 2024, 07:44:22 PM

Still, the sound issue which was the point of the OP still stands, who in the local planning / zoning board let something as noisy as a mining farm get thought.

Probably doesn't matter too much to them, the politicians isn't living there anyways. The state in general is quite pro-crypto anyways.

[1] https://d2ghdaxqb194v2.cloudfront.net/2865/193123.pdf
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/27/crypto-mining-electricity-use