While the investigators pore on the chain of events which plunged large expanses from Spain, Portugal and parts of the south of France in the dark earlier this week, an important figure in the mining sector of Bitcoin argued that the disaster was “very improbable”.
Daniel Battren, member of the Consultative Council of Marathon Digital Holdings (NASDAQ: Mara) and co-founder of the climate technology investor Ch4 Capital, used X to criticize what he called the “partial” nature of the renewable energy transition from Europe. Batten posted an instantaneous real -time generation taken at 12:30 p.m. local time, five minutes before cascading failure, showing the grid “running with very little … Generation of repairable rotation”, the rotary mass of thermal or nuclear turbines which traditionally ensure inertia and frequency stability.
Bitcoin mining can contain the key
“Would the deployment of large-scale bitcoin extraction have prevented power breakdowns in Spain / Portugal?” He asked. “Short answer:” Yes “.” Battren maintains that, in the absence of inertia of conventional plants, “renewals do not (provide it), which makes the grid more fragile if you do not have a way to load the case very quickly.”
Bitcoin minors, he maintains, precisely provide this controllable load. In Texas, whose ERCOT system recorded a wind penetration of 76% on a spring day, grid operators can reduce approximately 3 GW of “less than a second”. This capacity, wrote Baten, “in a coherent and instantly balancing frequency (s) instead of the rotation reserve”, allowing Ercot to browse the sudden supply of supply which would otherwise trigger the same automatic protections that collapsed the Iberian grid.
“What happened in Spain and Portugal is not an inherent risk of renewal,” said Baten. “This is what happens when the renewable energy transition is partially done, without consideration duly to loading balancing … We have the solutions just under our nose, let’s start to use them.”
The Batten Post attracted the immediate postman of some. X User Aurum Digitalis replied that “the shorter short answer is: we do not know. But that would have helped the grid by acting as a flexible load. ” Batten has accepted epistemic prudence while maintaining his thesis: “Correct, the only way to know something with certainty is that it happens. Likewise, there is good evidence to say that it is very unlikely that the event has occurred … Since the deep cause … was the lack of reserve of rotation at the time. ”
The Spanish and Portuguese authorities have so far awarded the power failure to a “significant power imbalance” which has triggered automatic judgments designed to protect the critical equipment. They excluded cyber-intrusion and focus on a technical failure somewhere in the synchronous grid of the Iberian peninsula. The full service was restored during the night, but the incident has rekindled a debate on the speed with which the response to safeguarding and advanced demand must evolve as Europe approaches its 2030 renewable energy objectives.
Battren insists that Bitcoin operations should be part of this toolbox, alongside the batteries. He notes that the mining infrastructure is “modular and inexpensive to deploy” and can reduce retail prices by absorbing excessive production which would otherwise be reduced to the network operator’s expense. The batteries, he adds, “are also part of the solution”, but serve a different niche because they provide energy, while minors absorb it mainly at the time.
At the time of the press, BTC exchanged $ 94,503.
Star image created with dall.e, tradingView.com graphic
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