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Comment by johnm1019 | Hacker News Reader

I like how it is done by the utility in San Francisco. Depending on the size of your place, and your main method of heating (electric or not), there are tiers setup (based on average weather in each month) where the first X kWh are the cheapest and correspond to what they think a dwelling of that size should need. Then the next Y kWh are about 30% more expensive, then after that there is a final tier which is 60% more expensive. In this way by saving energy you save doubly - you pay for less kWh, and what you do pay for is on a cheaper tier. I think this seems like an easy way to handle these miners, while allowing non "electricity-based" to continue unimpeded.

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Don't most areas charge you less for the first X kWh? I understand that you have 3 tiers, but wherever I went there was always 2.

The majority of the demand is almost certainly from industrial sized operations in warehouses and not rouge miners overloading residential electrical circuits.

I'd say that's baseless speculation, considering the amount of people who treat bitcoin mining as a grow-op.

Sure, the industrial operations are the ones getting articles and showcases and blog posts, but at the same time I've seen plenty of news articles of police busting some kid for scamming/drug charges and catching him with 100 gpus in his room.

More like basic math and direct experience. My business sells power supplies to this industry. Say the average home or apartment has 200 Amp electrical service (24 Kilowatts). A typical miner takes about 12 Amps meaning you can run about 16 units maximum on home electric service. 16 units isn't really enough to reach the scale you would need to be long term profitable in the industry. That isn't to say there aren't a few fools who don't realize that and are running a small scale operation out of an apartment but this article is citing requests for _Megawatts_ of demand from single customers. That is unquestionably industrial scale.

Anecdotally i've shipped a ton of equipment to Wenatchee and every operation I've done business with has been in an industrial warehouse.

Why do you like it? To me it sounds stupid, it's the same electricity, it costs the same to produce and all other side effects effects like network load or pollution are the same too. Why first X units would cost less?

Even more idiotic is that it apparently depends on the size of your house, so if you have a larger home, you get more cheap electricity.

It does not cost the same amount to distribute different amounts of energy, as a matter of fact. If you build infrastructure capable of handling a certain amount of electricity plus some overhead, you want to disincentivise eating into that overhead before you can build better infrastructure.

If this was the case, it would make sense to charge for capacity, not for usage. Like, if you ever want to use more than X amps of electricity, you have to pay for upgraded wires and stuff. Doesn't explain charging less for first X units per month.

I disagree - charging for usage (even if most of your costs come from capacity) incentivises people to use less power, which means you need less grid capacity and reduces externalities (pollution due to generating). If I'm paying for 100A _regardless_, for the things I need to run at peak (say kettle+washing machine+hoover), there's little incentive to reduce my usage at other times (switching lights/devices off when they aren't in use); if I'm paying for usage, there's a very direct incentive to turn things off I'm not using (it's costing me money).

People expect to be charged for amount used, not capacity, so changing it is very hard.

See the OP. They are not charged the amount used. They are charged some weird function of amount used, the rate it was used at, and their home size.

They are charged based on their amount used relative to their fair allocation.

If they use more than their fair allocation everyone else on the grid is subsidizing them so they get charged more to prevent a subsidy. If they use less than their fair allocation they subsidize other people so they're charged less to prevent subsidy.

The electric grid and the electricity that flows over it is a public utility not a commodity.

Edit: Is unpopular42 a throwaway account that you upvote with your main?

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