So I don't have any context for this. The article says it uses as much power as 300,000 homes. Is that a little? Is that a lot? How much does one steel foundry use?

Edit: One steel foundry uses about 3,000 more than that, according to my napkin math

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sowbug 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

You can multiply your own power bill by 300,000 if money is a more relatable unit.

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lostlogin 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

These discussions often turn into a ‘is this per hour? Per year?’ Discussion, which I find irritating. And now I’m that guy.

Is this a daily usage thing? I test based on my home usage and the numbers seem way out. I use about 25kWh per day.

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pests 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Isnt 3000x more per day, the same as 3000x more per year? Or 3000x more per unit price?

I have a smaller house, we use about 13kWh per day. 4kw highest spike during the day around 5-7pm when people are cooking and doing laundry.

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lostlogin 2 days ago | parent [-]

I was trying to work backwards to see what they were using as their ‘per house’ measure.

Your usage is very low. Do you use electricity for water heating and cooking? If so, that’s impressive.

We do, and charge a car.

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pests 2 days ago | parent [-]

Oh I see okay yeah.

Used to have one electric car but it was on a separate meter with unlimited charging for $40/mo (just looked, now its $46). Added a few hundred to the charger install originally.

We really don't do too much around the house. Three people. One TV running maybe two sometimes. Two desktops (well one is laptop with a dock). A random PC as a server. Everything electric (oven, range, water heater, filtration, etc) besides furnace (nat gas), although I will say they are all new and pretty energy efficient. Random lights (all LED, Hue). Someone turns on an electric heater or blanket here or there. Some outside heated cat house and water heaters and stuff. In Michigan so its pretty cold right now.

I recently bought a bunch of (used) solar panels and was doing our load calculations for peak draw and selecting battery size.

How much of your usage is the car? I could imagine that would be a lot. A single model 3 refill (57kwh) would be almost 5 days of my usage.

edit: I'm dumb. We replaced our electric water heater a few months ago with a tankless gas. I don't feel like rewriting this reply but just keep in mind.

I would eventually like to replace the furnace and the water heater with electric so I can end gas service to my house. I do feel its the safest and in the future we will be looked back on as backwards. "They used to pump a flammable gas directly into their houses!"

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lostlogin a day ago | parent [-]

The car isn’t heavily used but averages about 6-8kWh per day.

With solar we are making a ton more power than we are using at the moment, it’s a sunny summer and we are managing to export something like 8x the power we are drawing from the grid.

	▲	pests 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		How much solar do you have? Any battery? What rate does your power company give you? I recently bought 30 600w panels that were used, apparently they used to be on a GM parking lot canopy but got uninstalled during covid lockdown and were in storage for ~4 years. I got a great price and I've tested ~30% and they are all in spec. We pay ~$0.23 per kwh all in (supply, distribution, etc). Our provider (DTE) only pays ~$0.08 per kwh we supply, and its a credit and maxed out at our bill amount. So if we spend $200 on energy, we can only get $200 off. Which does mean free electricity, but also means no profit. We use about ~1000kwh a month, our 30 panels can generate about ~3000kwh a month. Could deploy just 10 panels and resell or do better with batteries but the resell market does not make sense for me.

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manuelmoreale a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I know it’s not the point you’re making but I’ll never not be surprised by how much electricity some people consume. The highest month I have recorded over the past 3 years is ~9kWh/day.

Last month it was 7. And we’re in the winter. Over the summer is more like 5.

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NewJazz 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A third of my bill is the "base services" charge.

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dirkt 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Isn't "you can waste energy and heat up our planet and make live for everybody else harder just to make money for a few" enough?

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jesse__ 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think a large steel foundry uses approximately 1/10 of the power of this facility.

Arc furnace foundry : 500 kw/tonne

Production : 150 t/hr

500*150 = 75 MW/h

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NewJazz 2 days ago | parent [-]

I'm not 100% but I think you may have confused watts and watt hours somewhere in there. Wouldn't it be X kWh/ton?

	▲	jesse__ 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, I think you're right. Maff still maffs though. Units work out to MWh/h.. which makes sense to me

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wat10000 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

3,000x would be 2.1 terawatts. That would require about 100 Three Gorges Dam, currently the largest generating station in the world, to power one foundry. Or about 2,100 nuclear power plants of typical size. I think your napkin math might be a bit off.

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epolanski 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

To solve crypto sudokus I would say it's a lot.

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msisk6 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This was previously the location of an Alcoa aluminum smelter which used something around 1000+ MW. And that's why the crypto farm is there -- it already had sufficient electrical capacity to the site.

Folks should be happy since the crypto operation is using far less power and dumping less heat into the environment that the industrial operation that was previously there, but datacenters seem to be a trendy thing complain about at the moment so here we are.

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dajt 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Where is the upside here? An alu plant probably provided more jobs and produced something of actual utility. This is burning power for no benefit to society.

It's burning less power than before, but it's not producing anything of value.

The world cannot reasonbly run without alu, it got along better without crypto currencies.

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msisk6 2 days ago | parent [-]

Oh, I agree. I lived nearby (working for ERCOT; the Texas Power Grid operator) when Alcoa was still there and was planning the shutdown. It seems about half the people in Rockdale worked for either Alcoa, the nearby coal power plant, or the nearby coal mine that fed the power plant.

I remember the local press going on about the crypto mining operation and how folks were going get high-tech jobs in this rural area of Texas. Of course it didn't go that way.

Aluminum smelting is an incredibly energy intensive operation. A lot of places in the US that used to host aluminum smelters now host large datacenters, include the Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon on the Columbia river near a hydro dam. It's a shame that Rockdale didn't get something useful like these other places.

As far as Al smelting in the US; I don't know. I'd imagine it produces a lot of air pollution by itself and uses huge amounts of power that is usually generated by cheap methods like burning rocks (coal) or large hydro operations nearby to minimize transmission costs. Then you gotta get ore to the site. The only Al smelter I recall being left in the US is up near Puget Sound in Bellingham, WA and I think it's currently shutdown.

	▲	bigiain 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I've heard of aluminium referred to as "Frozen Electricity". (yes, I know, but that's the .au spelling) Relatively speaking, bauxite is practically worthless. But mix it in with a few gigawatt hours and you get out a fairly valuable commodity.
	▲	duskwuff 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I remember the local press going on about the crypto mining operation and how folks were going get high-tech jobs in this rural area of Texas. Of course it didn't go that way. That's a disappointingly common crypto industry lie. Cryptocurrency mining involves very little labor beyond initial construction; it's certainly not a major source of permanent employment.

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troglo-byte 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A cryptominer is a "datacenter" in the same way that a chop shop is an automotive parts supplier.

	▲	msisk6 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Well, yeah. Both crypto and AI require places with cheap power to rack and stack compute and GPUs. It remains to be seen if AI will end up being about as useful as crypto in the long run.

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lolc 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I do get utility out of aluminium.

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whatsupdog 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, and I'm assuming the power plant that was providing electricity to the aluminum plant also wants to recover their investment.

It would be cool if all this residual heat could be concentrated to smelt aluminum!

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2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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mmooss 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A mercury refining plant or uranium enrichment facility would also be worse neighbors, but that has nothing to do with the benefits and costs of the crypto farm.

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drivingmenuts 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

How many people did the smelter employ vs how many people do the bitcoin miners employ?

The smelter was providing jobs that fed money into the local economy. I'm sure much less money is coming out of the mining operation.

	▲	cruffle_duffle 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not to mention the aluminum plant was making something actually useful to society at large. What is there now is a giant space heater used to scam people.

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nullc 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Home energy usage is knocked down people that don't that don't do anything at home and where almost their energy use is externalized (at places that make the goods they use, or other places where they spend most of their their waking hours).

So it's a useful figure if you want to make a shocking headline. "Uses as much power as infinity of something that uses no power!"

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driggs 2 days ago | parent [-]

Have you considered that it's used as a unit to represent capacity of our power grid?

As in, we have now have the energy capacity for 300,000 fewer homes given this operating data center.

So not only is it a relatable unit, but it's an incredibly meaningful unit for those who care about ensuring that energy availability actually support something of value (families) rather than something wasteful (crypto mining).

	▲	2 days ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]