YouSaid · the spoken record

Shaun Connell

lines on the record: 81
first: 2022-05-25
most recent: 2022-05-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Couldn't have somebody promote it any better than him. And then I would say just kind of like list off like four bullet points on saying, you know, like, why is Bitcoin a great tool for the energy transition? And first, I'd say this is a tool for energy flexibility is having a lot more intermittent resources. You need to have something for balance in the grid. This is something that provides second is ancillary services. So like all the backup generation that's been used in the past, like this is new flexibility for these intermittency. You've now got a global floor price of energy, right? So anybody around the world can monetize the generation asset now with mining. And then last is just a cherry on the top is you've got a new off-taker for renewables where some of these renewable projects that were kind of stranded in certain areas is struggling to find a buyer because they were being curtailed or wouldn't have a buyer. You now have somebody that can come to this area and kind of support the growth of this renewable space.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think the first stop, but I'd encourage them all to go listen to Brad Jones' five minute CMBC clip and you say, as a policymaker saying, what is the CEO of the grid that has the most amount of mining that's had some challenges with some outages in the past years? Think about this, right?”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks for having me on. People can reach me on Twitter at Sean Energy, S-H-A-U-U-N, and then Energy. And most of the stuff that we've shared here today, I post a lot of kind of pictures and slides and stuff like that on this. So yeah, I'd love for people to reach out to me. And yeah, I think that's it.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Battery banks and located right by solar and wind, et cetera. And it was just kind of their jaw dropped, right? And so what they're missing was it's happened so fast, right? That you went from two megawatt containers to this Rocktiff facility with riot is now like coming up along north of 500 megawatts that things come out online here soon. And so it's happened so fast. It's not surprising. It's not on the radar, right? And so, what's lost on people is just the impact that these facilities can have because of the size they are and how they can balance these grades and provide the same services it generators. But if you think of these as just like these two megawatt containers, it's like, come on, right? There's not enough scale there, right? And so what's lost on people, I think, is just how big it is.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it means you look back in 25% energy came from wind or solar. They need to do these market reforms on rules and products for managing the grids because when power markets were created, deregulated in 2000s, there was no wind or solar, right? So of course the market rules wouldn't have taken that into consideration. So a long way of saying this is that when I was sharing this information with the market monitor, I was saying the reason why it's probably not on your radar is because on 2017, this is Bitcoin mining. I showed a picture of a two megawatt container in some industrial park and a transformer on, right? And then I shared a picture of what the Rockdale site looks like in Texas, which got in Chad puts up there on his Twitter and copied and pasted that there. And you can see this is what it looks like. And then I showed a picture and said, this is what it can look like in the future. And it has like.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And load being not responsive, right? So load can't respond to prices perfectly inelastic. And so generation will get paid at essentially the node they inject in the grid. It's called the LMP price, locational marginal price. So they get paid at that node. Whereas a load will take the average of the volumetric weighted average across all the nodes in a certain area. And they're going to get the average price. And so the message I was communicating with this independent market monitor was saying, encourage you to think about these as the same as batteries. And these should get actually LMP pricing because they can actually relieve congestion at that point. And you also, you want to send the right price. You want to have the right signal. You want the right market behavior that says, hey, there's cheap electricity up here. Go locate load here. And if you can have like that nodal price. And so after a winter storm, Yuri and, you know, the observations I'm reading says that, you know, when power systems get to about 25% renewable.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say that so I was making a presentation to. Independent market monitor about kind of benefits, and this is something that we kind of look at ISO, one of the jurisdictions for the rules, and essentially make some suggestions on how could they improve their market, right? And so they're responsible for being this third party that can look at the market and then make suggestions to the state or the utility commission on how to improve. And so I presented to them two years ago, and what I was trying to communicate was saying, the same way you think about batteries that you can put them on certain parts of the grid to relieve congestion, right? Because they can come up and down and they can respond to price signals, is that I encourage them to think about these controllable loads as the same way. And the reason was because, and this goes back to kind of how power markets were formed over the last hundred years.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I got burned so many times in the beginning, like 2003, 4005 because these companies hadn't developed the capabilities in-house or through third parties to essentially make those changes for how they're dispatching these generation assets. And so we're starting to see that now in the mining space too, right? Because you'll see some of these miners that maybe they don't turn down all the way because they're just realizing that they've got this facility that can be dispatched up and down and it has this additional flexibility. you know, kind of the takeaway on this is that the same way power generation had to mature as this deregulation happened, we're seeing that maturity happen with these mining companies as they get bigger and more sophisticated and kind of how they're operating their sites, right? So it's very similar reference”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that we're now maturing. So, again, this reference of kind of power markets when they're deregulating 2000 to 2010. I remember trading New England power market, which is a lot of natural gas there, and there's expensive natural gas in New England because there's not many pipelines. It's kind of constrained up in that area. And you would see the price of power for the next day at $200. And you do the math and you say, do you know what? Based on the price of gas, it makes more sense for them to sell back their gas and to not run their plant than to run their plant because they'll be uneconomic. It'd be a bad decision.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, and like the price of power year to date has been like $45. And the price for the balance of year is $120. So, comparing the economics for the past four months isn't the right proxy for what's coming up. And so back to again, your narrative where this mining set in this flora, I think there's going to be some hash rate coming offline at that time because it's uneconomic. And you're going to see some”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that these miners that were deep in the money are actually, some are getting out of the money, some of these new gen miners might need to turn off for some periods during the summertimes and later in the year. So I think we're kind of in that mode right now. So I don't think the margins are really good right now for these miners. Well, step back is like, they're okay right now for the last two months.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The price of natural gas in Europe is something like 25 to $30 an MMV2. And here in the United States, today it's about $8. So that means that you can't do mining in Europe because gas is three times more expensive there, which means the power is way too expensive, right? The power prices here, like if you would have gone back in January, margins were fat, right? Like it was good because this big gas move hadn't happened. So I think we're experiencing that right now.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2020 was down to 30, right? And so, like, it was kind of like, and again, just like this overlay of power generation is like there's this kind of similar behaviors where it's power companies will build generation because even though the market says they don't need it, they think that when they put it online, it's going to be there, right? And I come from a trading background, I say there's a better way to express that view than to build an asset that's out of the money on the start, right? You could buy call options on power that could accomplish that instead of buying this really big physical asset and maybe couldn't get off the amount of volume that you wanted to do. But so I see these behaviors that are happening in mining that overlaid the same behaviors because people, there's just people making decisions. And so right now we're at a point where I mentioned that summer power across the United States can be like 150, 200, right? Which means that these new gem miners are going to be out of the money. And so in Europe.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think that over time these come back and they make sense, right? And just something that kind of got me excited recently with this power price move is it actually made the economics of mining not so good, right? Because if you have this minor that was in 2017 that was making $500 a megawatt hour for some months and then, yeah.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two and a half days, and there's a lot of stories behind that, but that state of 2014 when there was no charging stations is much different now in 2022, where I can go anywhere and charge these things, right? And so framing kind of the centralized and mining is just like we're now at a 15 gigawatt. So there might be pockets of centralization. But you go to 300 gigawatts and it's a global mining operation, right? It becomes less of, I think, less of an issue because it's. Not just focused on a region in the US or in some types of states. It's gotten to some massive adoption level that it's very global, distributed in the size of the capacity of megawatts or securing the network is much larger. So I think it's less significant in the future.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It kind of goes into the category of maybe in the category of mining pools and hash rates and that there's, you know, now there's a blend of, and I haven't looked in a long time, but say it's 10 big pools and 10% and it's not a central attack. But I generally think that, again, it's kind of, I bought a Tesla in 2014 where I flew out to Vancouver and I drove it back to Calgary and it was a nightmare because there was no charging stations that took me.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's going to go part in that decision. And that's every energy company will say, how do we think about pairing this with some type of racking solution that allows us a non-wires alternative for selling our power?”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The side just as a floor, like a bed, right? And so they'll say, We'll take whatever you got because we're just going to put this here, and this is better than. Getting paid negative 10 if we inject to the grid.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prediction in the future is that I'll use 20 years out because everything's possible in 20 years and it's hard to say that's wrong, is that when the current cost for a megawatt of wind and a megawatt of solar is roughly a million dollars. And the infrastructure required for a racking solution for miners is call it a quarter million. And so now think about your doing this new wind project or solar project. Bitcoin's been around for 30 years, right? And you're saying, okay, I want to go to connect to the grid. And actually, you're probably not saying I'm going to connect to the grid. How do I monetize this? Your starting point, right? It's going to probably be a blend of mining in the grid. And so in the future, I predict that the decisions on when you're doing this capital outlay for wind and solar projects will just naturally have this quarter million dollar purchase for your racking solution and you'll have a strategy that after everyone of these halvings or just during these down periods where you have public miners with lots of capital that can replace these miners and essentially retire the old ones you're going to have these renewables projects just sit on”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now is more like 300 gigawatts, right? Which is not insignificant. And so that kind of, we probably have to shift away from that from, again, of just like, is this good use of energy versus saying, do we think of batteries as green or dirty, right? Because batteries are injecting power into their, withdrawing power from the grid and then injecting backing the grid. Are we assessing who's getting those megawatts that are coming out of the battery? It's like, no, this is a tool for the transition, right? And if you think about an uptime, it's maybe like a 50% because half the time it's injecting the drawing, right? Where is mining can be up 95% of the time? And for these miners that are old Gen miners, they can be at the money where they can be 50% up and down. But when you frame it more on saying that this is a tool that helps with these transitions, you kind of get away from that having to say this, you know, is it just use of energy and we're just insignificant on the total quantity. But so my”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of these put options, assuming you've got the capacity of doing that, right? It was the same thing with those Bitcoin miners when they were virtually free in 2020 and saying, what is the cost of a strip of call options on Bitcoin price? It's like, well, what's the cost of these Bitcoin miners? Because there's an arb there. But you need the infrastructure to plug it in. So I just see these as like, it's not like these energy companies are going to be saying, I believe that these energy companies are going to be all in where all they're doing is mining, right? They're going to be saying, hey, we need to have different options for monetizing our energy. There's certain benefits that accrue to all by them doing that. And so it's just, yeah, I see a future where another big reason for education on the mining side here is that we often frame this back in the category of kind of is a good use of energy and one of the common rebuttals is saying that we just use a fraction of the energy of the world, right? Which is true right now. But if it does what we think it's going to do, right, then that means that the 15 gigawatts today in 10 years from now.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know if it's a framing of who eats who, I think it's more of where's the market share go, right? And you think about kind of that the hash rate market share, and I'm making this up, and I'm going to be wrong, say it's public companies are public mining companies are 75% and the rest 25%, right? So in the future, what is the blend of public mining companies, public or private energy companies, other mining companies? And I think that there's the actors in the space, on the energy side, right, they all see this value, right? And they recognize that the current customer they have, which is a grid, sometimes is a great customer, but if you own a business, wouldn't you rather have two customers versus one, right? You can almost look at this as like, and the way that I was thinking about it when I was with Transelta is just like, you know, what would it cost to buy a, you know, strip of put options on power, right? It's just like, well, you can buy the miners for cheaper than that. So like you're actually arbing the price.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, and I think that Nick Carter might have been on there as well. I think he might have. Had an influence on the writing of that document. I have, and I think that our signatures on the back on one of the last pages, our company. So yeah, it's just great that we now have the information, and they did a wonderful job preparing that response.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It'd be like, we found it, and so the concern I have is that we're at this very pivotal place for Bitcoin where it's hard to put the pieces together, but why this is amazing for energy, amazing for money has these great characteristics. But if it gets goes down this wrong path and then too many people start believing a certain thing and then it starts an executive order happens, right? You have to ban minding. That's a fear where I feel like we're ahead of the narrative now and it's starting to kind of pick up. And my observation is that for the past few years is miners are tremendously smart folks that know their business inside and out, but when asked for, you know, what is, how's Bitcoin benefiting renewables? They're like, I'm not too sure, but I just know it is, right? And so now it feels like the pieces are coming out where it's really data backed and you can see and you're like, yes, right?”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that Nick Carter was early to recognize this. And so he's And he's just like, I think this is like that really important piece of information that we need to really figure out, right? So that we can. Yeah. And I share this on Peter's podcast is that something I think is really important for everybody to be educated in the space and to understand the value is that if nuclear generation was invented today, it would be the magic pill. We wouldn't have all these perceptions and beliefs about this being bad and that it's going to be bad.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Feel very confident that it's going to keep going. And everyone say never on this stuff, right? But just. If you check the boxes and say, you know, what is Bitcoin mining? Like, what's it's kind of like that rabbit hole of, you know, for me, my experience was that you go into Bitcoin and then it takes a three-year rabbit hole of like, what is money and what problems being solved? And it's amazing rabbit hole that gets you into all these books that you never thought you'd read and just phenomenal. And so I feel like we're now accidentally kind of getting the benefit of Bitcoin solving another big issue and saying, what is energy?”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The real story on this is like I think we're out of evidence at the end of the year on just how these miners were operating in an environment when power prices were very high. And you'll see them turning down at different times that even when there wasn't scarcity events because the power prices were just too high, which goes back to that narrative saying in the long run, Bitcoin will be the buyer of last resort. But we need to transition there and it's going to take time. with this extreme vol that's happening right now this year in in power markets we're going to get a it's going to foreshadow what what that looks like i believe so be pretty neat year to see that”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, like, you've now priced out a bunch of these miners, right? And if they do another doubling of hash rate over the balance of year, that means that it's twice as more difficult on the mining, right? And so in kind of listening to you in the past, it sets up that kind of next push, right?”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And some of these other miners that are talked about that $200 average, that means that there's going to be several hours above $400 or $500 if this materializes, right? Because it's just the average of the entire, the month's averages for those peak hours. So I think that we're going to see for the balance of year, and this is where mining has an opportunity to shine, is you're going to see this evidence of these miners turning down because if power prices have tripled, That means the economics of mining has gone down, right, which I've listened to you on other podcasts and that you think about kind of the price of mining as the floor for energy, right? We've just tripled the floor.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So for the past five years, $35, $40, the price of power for the balance of year across the United States now with this 3x in gas prices is north of $100, right? And in certain periods, like summer, the average price for the column peak hours, which is Monday to Friday, seven in the morning until 11 at night, that's priced in at $200. And the off peak, which are the morning hours, is priced at $100. And so the average for summers, 150, right? So what happens if you have an S9 miner in ERCOT, right? And your break-even right now is $80, right? Like that miner is coming offline.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is where I get excited about this as well where the power market's started in 2000 versus where they are now in 2020 was much different. And so where mining is today and where it's going to be in 10, 20 years is completely different. We're going to have a great experiment in the next year because for a long time these miners have had such a high break-even point. They're running 95% of the time, right? Because prices only go above that certain amount of hours per year. Over the past 16 months, gas prices tripled and over the past four months, it's more than doubled. And in power markets is that natural gas is your marginal unit, right? It's the one that balances your real-time load supply.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody, I think, would be saying, holy crap, right? That's amazing. We can put these facilities next to these renewables. And since power is mostly always over $20, they'll be turning off. This is the greatest thing in the world, right?”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, think about this like so for these new Gen miners, they're break even right now is about $200 a megawatt. And the average price for the past five years or so has been about $50. So like they're well above the average, but whenever there's price spikes, they turn down. And so some of the education that needs to be shared with folks on this is saying that they're always going to be turned down when the price above 200, right? But imagine the story of saying this miner only turns online when the price is below $20. And so this miner is only going to consume that super excess energy, and you can tell it's excess because it's so cheap.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so they got paid on this contract for differences. So they didn't get paid by Ercott. They just did the right thing, right? They did what made sense is saying this price is way too high for me. I can't afford to pay for that. I just need to be offline, which is good for everybody else because energy is scarce. And had that same miner has said, I'm not going to, instead of turning down, I'm going to be selling ancillary services. I'm going to run and I'm going to be the best low-cost option providing ancillary service. Well, ERCOT's going to pay them for that ancillary service and the miner's going to pay for the energy and you net those two together. And that's kind of like the net cost that they would have had. But kind of back to the point of saying ERCOT's not making arrangements with miners on saying, hey, to turn down, it's.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there are a lot of miners that did very well. And the reason was because they turned offline, right? And so they weren't consuming energy during this event. And they had this contract for differences hed And so they'd entered into a contract for difference hedge where saying we bought at $50 per megawatt for X number of years around the clock. And then prices during that time settled. There were several days that settled at $9,000. Black swana, black swans.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is what the rate is, and it's great because it's transparency. It's not backdoor deals or something like that, right? So you know what you're going to be getting. And on the energy side is that you're going to be purchasing energy from the grid operator who's Ercott, all they're doing is they're a clearinghouse, right? And they're essentially taking all the generation and they're saying, who's willing to sell power for what price? I'm going to stack it up. And here's where the demand is. I'm going to set the price at that marginal megawatt. And so if you're in one of these areas where it's an investor-owned utility, you're essentially able to buy at the spot price, right? So at this clearing price, and you can also do hedging for that location, which is essentially a contract for differences because you're going to buy your physical power from the grid operator. And then you can have this financial hedge on the side that's like a contract for differences to kind of hedge that risk. So in the example where somebody says, for example, in winter storm Yuri went through Ercott February 2021, caused very high prices.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so there's zooming back out on power markets. Which is false because there's different types of, again, back to the components, there's their wholesale generation, there's your wires company, your utility company, and then your retail supply side. And so when you go into a market like Ercott, which is deregulated, is that if you go into some utility company area where it's an investor-owned utility, right, which is approximately, I think it's about two-thirds of Texas, that means that the rate for the transmission is set by the Public Utility Commission. So there's no negotiating, right? It's”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can use this for backup power, I can use this for energy, depending on how the owner of the facility has offered it into their grid. But it's this great resource for helping them balance their grids, especially as they're transitioning to more renewables.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They do this right away. So he made a comment in his video about how that's been proven that this is working in the state. And then he's kind of tying back into that. Certain types of flexible resources. There's four categories power generation, there's intertize. So that's your grid connectivity. There's batteries and there's demand response. And so Ercott's an island, right? And it's an island that doesn't have hydro. And hydro is a great flexible resource, right? It's like a battery, it's storage, right? So they don't have any batteries. And since they're an islanded grid, they can't lean on their connections with the rest of the United States to pull power if there's any type of problem. So they really got to be self-supporting, right? And so Brad Jones' message was saying that they've really embracing these miners because they're offering a lot of flexibility to their grid operators and it's essentially like a grid operator swiss army knife.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He also commented about how when there's a plant that could trip offline, is that there's been a track record for these loads being able to do frequency response. And what that means is that the heart rate of the grid is at 60 hertz per second. And so if something trips offline, the heart rate changes and you can't wait for a dispatch. You got to automatically sense, like these power generations do, they automatically sense the change in the frequency. And then they kind of inject more power or for these controllable loads is they turn down, right? And so they.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With massive amounts of Bitcoin mining, what is he saying about this? And his message was one of them, he said, was saying, hey, we've got this amazing wind and solar resource in Texas. We want to build that out and we want to have some type of load that can soak up that excess renewables because you don't want to turn down that resource. So one part, he said”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was looking on YouTube and I saw this. It was a CNBC clip, and it was Brad Jones. And he was talking about mining. And so I flipped it on and my jaw dropped, right? Because ERCOT has been the early adopter of these controllable loads, right? And the controllable load is what allows you to turn these power generators in reverse. They have the benefit that they are an islanded electricity grid where they're not connected to the rest of the US, which allows them to do things without meeting FERC approval, which is a federal approval. So they can experiment and do things faster than others, and they've been very kind of, you know, I call it the entrepreneurial, the mindset down in Texas. And so these control loads have been coming on in Texas, and you've probably seen the news, some of these large sites that are coming online. And so the interview was with Brad Jones, and it was kind of like, it was the ultimate perfect interview that you would kind of say, what would you hope the CEO of the power system that is being kind of bummed?”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So I live in Canada, but the company I work for Lanceum's Houston based company, and I'm down there half the time, so I'm pretty well versed with Ercott. So that's kind of where I've been spending a lot of my time. About a month ago, the interim CEO of ERCOT, his name is Brad Jones.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no work in progress, right? It's completed jobs. So you didn't have wasted effort prior to that, those throwaway. You were able to stop immediately and you turned down. And as soon as the price changes, or if you've been called on to provide one of these ancillary services, you can go back up. But you've just got the ultimate flexible resource now that can do this type of low balancing.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The arc furnaces like that assembly line, right? So you're kind of going through this process. You have the arc furnace, and then it goes to lateral, and I forget all the other pieces, but it's kind of like an assembly line for like a car. You got to go through these stages. And so you got to interrupt the process when you do this. If you think about a hundred tera hash per second Bitcoin miner, that's the equivalent of saying you have a machine that can start, finish, and monetize $100 trillion per second.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's literally somebody that's sitting by a switch, and when they say we're going to come down for a couple hours, they hit the button, and they can come down for two hours, and they're going to drop 95% of their peak electricity demand, but they can only do it for like two hours. And the reason is because the steel is going to harden. It's going to turn into igna. It's going to cause a whole bunch of problems. So you got to turn the arc furnace back on. And so that's an example of demand responses. It's the best one that there is today Until Bitcoin mining. And so now the way to think about Bitcoin mining is”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bitcoin mining is demand response And it's the Rolls Royce of Demand response. It's the pinnacle and why this is, is that think about the current Rolls-Royce of Demand Response for industrial manufacturing would be the steel plant. And the reason why is it's got one single energy intensive application, which is the arc furnace.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With all this intermittency, you essentially need to have a 4x on your flexible resources that you have available to grid. And currently, 95% of flexibility comes from generation right now. And 1% comes from demand response in batteries. And then the IEA put out this publication. And their forecast says that batteries and demand response need to do 50%. So you're going to go from 1% to 50%.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over the next year and a half, they're going to go from 10 gigawatts to about 20 gigawatts. So on this average day, about half of your generations come from solar. So what happens when the sun goes down at the end of the day is you have this really big two-hour ramp period where you need to bring on a whole lot of resources to make up for the fact that you're losing your solar resources. And the current solution right now is natural gas, right? It's a great load balancing resource. Phenomenal, right? But what happens when you lose these is that you need to have new resources that can do this. And so, you know, going back to the example is.”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On a variance level, right? Right. So, like, zooming out again is like, you know, three times electricity demand, negative 1x, fossil fuels. 50x went in solar. And so, what that's going to do is it's going to create a lot more volatility for kind of intermittency on the grid, right? When is the wind blowing? When is the sun shining? And to balance that, right, is what you need to have is you need to have flexible resources and new flexible resources that aren't fossil fuels, but resources that can come to the grid and can balance during those periods. And so I'll use an example of in ERCOT there's 10 gigawatts of solar right now in their average demand is approximately 45 gigawatts”
2022-05-25 · We Study Billionaires · BTC079: The Bitcoin Energy Revolution w/ Shaun Connell (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT