Australia is facing a huge problem with its electrical infrastructure right now. It has too much solar feeding back into the grid, as dumb as that might sound. The green revolution heavily backed by government incentives has made solar cheaper than many other countries. For context personally I’m pretty sure my 13kw Tesla powerwall cost $2.5k compared to its normal $10k, and when my parents got solar 15+ years ago they had a deal where their solar feed in was 40c usd, I think those contracts last 15-20 years, and mine is now 1.3c usd
Within 2 years it will cost to feed into the grid.
The opposition government wants to build nuclear power plants, which I don’t have a problem with but it has to operate at at least 50% loaf and the solar will be too much for it, at least that is what their reasoning is.
This leaves millions of homes and businesses in a bad spot where they will have to pay to pump power into the grid.
This gives a good opportunity for miners to give low ball offers on running miners at businesses with excess solar. For example my farm has 200kw of solar, some goes back into the grid. But also now will give me the opportunity to run miners on the farm for free or a low ball offer of 3c usd/kw sort of thing for 6-8 hours a day. All I would need to do is hook my mining container up there and use their power.
if you have solar and batteries you should be able to offset that 40c easily. but im sure that would only make sense as a bulk miner and not some random diy pop up home miner.
I love batteries but when you work out the cost per kw it uses per discharge it’s not that great for mining for profit. This one costs $9150 usd, not including the inverter, 20kw storage and has 6500 cycles. So its lifetime expectancy is 130MW of discharge. $9150/130,000 = 7c/kw to store. If you add their 12kw 3 phase inverter (I’ve ordered that inverter coming this week) that’s $13k usd in total, brings your costs to 10c/kw to store, and that’s not including paying to generate any power, just the storage and ability to use the power. There might be better deals out there but this is just what I’m familiar with
We currently mine in Aus from a mix of solar/grid, while it goes into negative pricing sometimes depending on the season, its actually pretty hard to find anyone with too much solar and an appropriate environment to mine. Never say never though
One solar installer I spoke to wanted to know more about mining because one of his clients had a 60kw system and they only run 5-10kw of power I think. You just gotta look in the right places, which would be hard I admit. I used my family farm as an example because thats easy for me.
Out of curiosity, how big is your mining operation and how big is your solar system? Cheers
We have a bit over 500 machines, close to 100PH. I believe our main site has around 3MW capacity, maybe a bit over 1 MW of solar at peak times this winter.
Yeah small systems that are offering about 50kw would be nice for small scale miners or hobbyists. I do wonder if there are any big industrial offices or factories that are well over that solar wise.
Nice mate, Are you up at Whyalla by any chance? If you’ve got any old broken S19 miners you want to sell hit me up I might be interested in buying some
