This is a good story that taps into a lot of the systemic failings in America that hinder progress. Failure of the state to prioritize energy sufficiency over hypothetical mineral rights. Failure of utility companies to maintain their infrastructure to modern standards. Failure of governments to produce consistent and predictable business environments. Failure of bureaucracy to prepare creators and visionaries for success.
All of this results in good intentions being squandered because too many entrenched entities would lose too much hypothetical value on a balance sheet to just do something better for everyone.
Many people even working in power/energy don't realize how much interconnection costs are a hinderance. Example: see study group DISIS-2021-001 in SPP (a grid region similar to ERCOT/Texas), a good 25 % of the planned capacity was hit with an interconnection cost approx > $300k/MW (which is similar to the cost of the OP).
Predictably, all of those projects dropped out of the interconnection queue / process
This is a much better read than I expected. Normally I'd insert a diatribe here about the US's anti-renewable-energy regulatory regime, but the author tells the story far more persuasively and compellingly than I could ever hope to.
So with mineral rights in Texas, could you just buy/lease them out from under one of your rivals/enemies and just bulldoze their buildings for the lulz? "Sorry, I just really needed that teaspoon of dirt from under your multimillion dollar factory". I guess that's the whole idea of the insurance/waivers, so do you need 50% of the owners of the rights to agree?
Also, I heard that Texas was the best place to build things (cf. Abundance by Thompson & Klein)
This is an excellent writeup. This rhymes with the complexities noted in https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/why-is-that-bank-bran....
Lots of seemingly little things that are necessary to get something off the ground.
Quick summary: Author had money "from crypto" and wanted to create a solar power plant in Texas. After dealing with challenging mineral rights and health issues, interconnect fees to the power company were too expensive to make the project worth it.
Every time I learn something new about Texas, I like Texas less.
At least Dr Pepper comes from Texas. There’s that to like. Everything else just always seems upside down absurd.
It’s too bad that Texas’ joke of an electrical grid defeated the project, but I think private profit on energy generation is really unlikely and produces a lot of bad incentives for plant operators.
In California the companies also systematically under-invest in capacity and maintenance, so the up-front cost of any project, even single home solar can get unpredictable fast.
If the interconnection costs were such a headache, why didn't he convert the solar farm to produce electricity consumed only locally to mine Bitcoin?
Sounds like you need to bribe some people. It is Texas
I'm sorry. Did I say bribe? I of course meant campaign donation?
Ah yes the age old story of a rich guy without a clue diving into a new industry and failing.
They should be requiring batteries with solar as well.
His install would have a net negative value to the Texas grid without it.
One of the problems with undisclosed and thoughtless use of LLMs for writing, like ChatGPT in this case, is that it undermines trust.
Take the many quotes in this article, which all sound like ChatGPT. Obviously, none of those people said those words, or even anything all that like what they supposedly said, because that's not what real people sound like.
If the author is willing to silently do that (which could be uncharitably described as "lying"), why should I trust anything else, like the numbers, or the factual claims?
Did any of this actually happen? (I note that there's not a single external link or fact that an ignorant layman like myself could quickly and easily verify, including the Astral Codex Ten part.)
Incidentally, there are a lot of typos in the titles in https://7goldfish.com/ .
> This is a much better read than I expected.
Hm...
I worked for about 8 months on an internal product for doing transmission studies at a large utility company. Basically, it would feed a PSS/E [1] file specifying most of the transmission grid into a power flow simulation software called TARA [2]. We would add a few extra elements to the grid to simulate a wind or solar plant. TARA would spit out all the components that would be overloaded, with or without contingencies. We would read the results and estimate the transmission costs.
Essentially, we were replicating the process that the ISOs used internally. The users of this product were all former ISO employees. The goal was to speed up the process of determining whether transmission costs were going to ruin a project before any money was spent. ISOs take months to do their analysis. The users told me that they were usually looking for $0 transmission upgrades on $50m+ projects.
The grid and contingency files from the ISOs were under confidentiality agreements. This rubbed me the wrong way from a competition point of view. We also had data about projects slated to be built which could take away capacity from our projects.
I could see a SaaS in doing this sort of analysis. It's probably bureaucratic between reselling TARA, NDAs, and maybe legal issues if the analysis was wrong. I have doubts about the market, most of the money is in big projects at big companies that are already doing this sort of thing.
[1] https://www.siemens.com/global/en/products/energy/grid-softw...
[2] https://power-gem.co/software/tara-software/