ERCOT, PUC, and deregulation got us here

Brisketexan · February 21

2 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

"Windless nights" is pretty much a red herring designed to strike fear into the hearts of the ignorant, and it's obvious what industry is stoking that fear. While any one local wind farm might see periodic reductions in power below baseline, the aggregate wind power generated across the grid is predictable and planned for.

Yes and no. Look, I'm a big fan of renewables, but we DO get functionally windless periods statewide. Especially in the heat of summer. So, we DO need on-demand power. It's okay to admit that. Things like batteries, nuclear, and yes, natural gas, belong in the mix still. The percentage SHARE of fossil fuel generation can and should go down, which it has done and is continuing to do. But we aren't close to a "zero fossil fuel" in the mix position yet.

I'm all for more battery projects, that helps reduce the share of generation from fossil fuel even more. And, globally speaking, I think that nuclear energy needs to increase its role in power generation. It's clean, reliable, and constant.

Our challenge is our market design. If it stays an "energy only" market, instead of adding a "capacity market" function, it will be next to impossible to get anyone to build new gas generation (or nuclear, for that matter). Why would you build something that doesn't make economic sense? A capacity market functions like insurance - you pay a little extra tacked onto your mortgage payment to pay for homeowners insurance. You pay for it whether you need it or not. Maybe you never need it. But when you need it, you NEED IT. But we won't do that. Because...well, you know all the reasons.

jimmyjazz · February 21

3 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Yes and no. Look, I'm a big fan of renewables, but we DO get functionally windless periods statewide.

And those are known and planned for. I mean, it's not like the data and trends aren't out there. We know how the wind works.

Judge Roybeanbag · February 21

45 minutes ago, Leeroy Jenkins said:

There are multiple battery facilities getting built in Texas. There are two going through the approval process in Henderson County right now.

Just curious, do you have to develop specialized firefighting plans in the event a battery barn catches fire?

Brisketexan · February 21

15 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

And those are known and planned for. I mean, it's not like the data and trends aren't out there. We know how the wind works.

Yes, they are known and planned for. And MOST of the time, there are sufficient additional resources. But from time to time, the resource availability cuts it close (and maybe even falls short). That's what happened in February 2021. It almost happened in the winter of 2011 (we ignored the warnings that event gave us). We cut it close in the cold snap in January. We don't have much in the way of "cushion" for when we have extreme weather events. Again, a capacity market is a lot like insurance -- you can go years without needing it....until you really, really need it.

Edited February 21 by Brisketexan

jimmyjazz · February 21

Thanks for the education, Dad. I only spent over two decades as a mechanical engineer inventing, patenting, developing, manufacturing and selling commercial scale power quality equipment. You know, this shit that keeps the lights on when the power goes out.

I have never once said we don't need the ability to quickly respond to supply sags, so I don't know what you're on about. I'm saying that renewable energy fluctuations can largely be predicted and planned for. It would also be nice if the statewide natural gas systems were winterized, but hey, WIND AND SOLAR FLUCTUATE.

Brisketexan · February 21

1 minute ago, jimmyjazz said:

Thanks for the education, Dad. I only spent over two decades as a mechanical engineer inventing, patenting, developing, manufacturing and selling commercial scale power quality equipment. You know, this shit that keeps the lights on when the power goes out.

I have never once said we don't need the ability to quickly respond to supply sags, so I don't know what you're on about. I'm saying that renewable energy fluctuations can largely be predicted and planned for. It would also be nice if the statewide natural gas systems were winterized, but hey, WIND AND SOLAR FLUCTUATE.

So...then I'm not sure what we're arguing about. You're getting mighty defensive and bristly when I'm not criticizing renewable energy in the slightest. I'm not disagreeing that energy fluctuations can largely be predicted and planned for. I'm just adding that "and sometimes, even if we use every available MW of generation....it won't be enough. Having that amount of generation available is a function of a market that incentivizes having only just enough power, as opposed to having a little extra, to provide a margin of safety." Oh, and I don't design or manufacture generation equipment. I just deal with the market in which it operates locally, particularly when that market has....issues. The market's issues generally are not because we have the wrong type of equipment or the equipment is poorly designed/manufactured (although you're dead-on on the failure to winterize natural gas systems....which will never really happen, for you know the reasons). The market's issues are because of its design, embodied in the ERCOT protocols. Which I have been elbow-deep in from time to time.

I'm not arguing against you, I'm really not. My sole point is that without a capacity market, our resource mix and planning efforts will continue to occasionally cut it way close, sometimes too close, and we'll be short of needed generation. It won't happen often. But it will happen. 2011 was a big warning. 2021 was the shit 2011 warned us about coming to pass. We have not materially modified the market since then. If we have another 2021 event, we will have another grid failure. Shit, if we continue to have summers like this past one, all it takes is a couple of resources having an unexpected outage, and we'll have to implement rolling blackouts. "Little to no margin for error" is not a great way to design a system that delivers a public utility. That's the sum total of my take here.

Post Oak · February 21

Sage Geosystems is going to start construction on a geothermal battery that they claim can provide back up power for up to 18 hours.

Super interesting imo

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/sage-geosystems-geothermal-storage-fervo-princeton/707879/

Spoiler

Sign up

DIVE BRIEF

Sage Geosystems raises $17M to build first-of-its-kind geothermal energy storage system in Texas

The plant will be able to store energy for both short and long durations using pressurized water stored underground.

Published Feb. 20, 2024

Kavya BalaramanFreelance reporter

Geothermal mud pots near the Salton Sea in California

Thermal mud pots at Controlled Thermal Resources’ project site near the Salton Sea in California. Courtesy of Controlled Thermal Resources

Listen to the article4 min

Dive Brief:

Geothermal company Sage Geosystems has closed a $17 million Series A funding, which will go towards funding a 3-MW commercial geo-pressured geothermal system in Texas, the company announced Thursday.
The plant — called EarthStore — will be able to store energy for both short and long durations using pressurized water stored underground, complementing solar, wind and other renewable sources of generation to help provide dispatchable energy to the grid, according to the company.
A recent study from Princeton University and geothermal start-up Fervo Energy found that tapping into the energy storage capabilities of enhanced geothermal reservoirs could help increase the value of the energy source dramatically.

Access now➔

TRENDLINE
Increasing grid reliability in the U.S.

Dive Insight:

Last September, Sage Geosystems conducted a pilot to test its technology and concluded that it could provide 18 hours or more of storage capacity at a cost that can compete with both shorter-duration lithium-ion batteries, as well as longer-duration pumped storage hydropower. The levelized cost of storage for its technology depends on duration and is between 2 cents/kWh and 4 cents/kWh, according to the company.

Sage’s technology involves drilling a well to form a fracture in a certain kind of rock formation, which is then used as a makeshift reservoir. Excess solar, wind or other renewable energy can be used to pump water into that reservoir, causing it to expand and store the water under pressure. When electricity is needed back on the grid, opening the facility’s valves will send water back to the surface, where it will turn a turbine to generate power. The company expects the technology can complement renewable energy, as well as replace gas peaker plants during periods when the grid is especially stressed.

Now, the company is preparing a first-of-its-kind commercial geothermal system in Texas. Sage is manufacturing equipment for the 3-MW facility and plans to begin constructing it in the second quarter of 2024, aiming for a commission date in the fourth quarter of the year. The exact location of the plant has not yet been announced.

Sage Geosystems chose Texas for its first commercial energy storage facility for two reasons: the ability to move rapidly, and the fact that the Texas market has rapidly growing installations of wind and solar, making it a good fit for energy storage, CEO Cindy Taff said in an email. The company is also looking at energy storage and geothermal projects in California, Arizona, and locations outside the U.S., and is eyeing a potential energy storage test in Arizona this year, she added.

Meanwhile, a study from Princeton University and Fervo Energy released in January found that tapping into the energy storage potential of enhanced geothermal — essentially, a form of geothermal energy that is less dependent on specific geographies — along with declines in the cost of drilling technologies could result in over 100 GWs worth of geothermal capacity in the Western U.S.

Traditional geothermal energy requires specific geographic conditions, including kinds of rock, and in 2022 produced only 0.4% of the total electricity in the U.S.

But newer approaches to drilling and hydraulic fracturing could change that. In fact, by using geothermal power plants in a flexible manner and leveraging their energy storage abilities, the value of the resource could be dramatically increased and used to smooth out intermittent renewable energy, the study found.

“Wind and solar are now the cheapest sources of clean energy, but their downfall is their variability and weather dependency. You can earn a lot of additional revenue if you can find a way to shift your clean energy generation to times without wind and solar,” Jesse Jenkins, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University, said in a statement.

Brisketexan · February 21

1 minute ago, Post Oak said:

Sage Geosystems is going to start construction on a geothermal battery that they claim can provide back up power for up to 18 hours.

Super interesting imo

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/sage-geosystems-geothermal-storage-fervo-princeton/707879/

Hide contents

Sign up

DIVE BRIEF

Sage Geosystems raises $17M to build first-of-its-kind geothermal energy storage system in Texas

The plant will be able to store energy for both short and long durations using pressurized water stored underground.

Published Feb. 20, 2024

Kavya BalaramanFreelance reporter

Thermal mud pots at Controlled Thermal Resources’ project site near the Salton Sea in California. Courtesy of Controlled Thermal Resources

Listen to the article4 min

Dive Brief:

Geothermal company Sage Geosystems has closed a $17 million Series A funding, which will go towards funding a 3-MW commercial geo-pressured geothermal system in Texas, the company announced Thursday.

The plant — called EarthStore — will be able to store energy for both short and long durations using pressurized water stored underground, complementing solar, wind and other renewable sources of generation to help provide dispatchable energy to the grid, according to the company.

A recent study from Princeton University and geothermal start-up Fervo Energy found that tapping into the energy storage capabilities of enhanced geothermal reservoirs could help increase the value of the energy source dramatically.

Access now➔

TRENDLINE
Increasing grid reliability in the U.S.

Dive Insight:

Last September, Sage Geosystems conducted a pilot to test its technology and concluded that it could provide 18 hours or more of storage capacity at a cost that can compete with both shorter-duration lithium-ion batteries, as well as longer-duration pumped storage hydropower. The levelized cost of storage for its technology depends on duration and is between 2 cents/kWh and 4 cents/kWh, according to the company.

Sage’s technology involves drilling a well to form a fracture in a certain kind of rock formation, which is then used as a makeshift reservoir. Excess solar, wind or other renewable energy can be used to pump water into that reservoir, causing it to expand and store the water under pressure. When electricity is needed back on the grid, opening the facility’s valves will send water back to the surface, where it will turn a turbine to generate power. The company expects the technology can complement renewable energy, as well as replace gas peaker plants during periods when the grid is especially stressed.

Now, the company is preparing a first-of-its-kind commercial geothermal system in Texas. Sage is manufacturing equipment for the 3-MW facility and plans to begin constructing it in the second quarter of 2024, aiming for a commission date in the fourth quarter of the year. The exact location of the plant has not yet been announced.

Sage Geosystems chose Texas for its first commercial energy storage facility for two reasons: the ability to move rapidly, and the fact that the Texas market has rapidly growing installations of wind and solar, making it a good fit for energy storage, CEO Cindy Taff said in an email. The company is also looking at energy storage and geothermal projects in California, Arizona, and locations outside the U.S., and is eyeing a potential energy storage test in Arizona this year, she added.

Meanwhile, a study from Princeton University and Fervo Energy released in January found that tapping into the energy storage potential of enhanced geothermal — essentially, a form of geothermal energy that is less dependent on specific geographies — along with declines in the cost of drilling technologies could result in over 100 GWs worth of geothermal capacity in the Western U.S.

Traditional geothermal energy requires specific geographic conditions, including kinds of rock, and in 2022 produced only 0.4% of the total electricity in the U.S.

But newer approaches to drilling and hydraulic fracturing could change that. In fact, by using geothermal power plants in a flexible manner and leveraging their energy storage abilities, the value of the resource could be dramatically increased and used to smooth out intermittent renewable energy, the study found.

“Wind and solar are now the cheapest sources of clean energy, but their downfall is their variability and weather dependency. You can earn a lot of additional revenue if you can find a way to shift your clean energy generation to times without wind and solar,” Jesse Jenkins, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University, said in a statement.

How does this implement Holonomics, spinning toroids, and travelling waves? Asking for....you know.

jimmyjazz · February 21

9 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

I'm not arguing against you, I'm really not.

I'm not suggesting you're arguing against me, only that you felt the need to point out that renewable sources sometimes fall outside supply expectations. It feeds the "unreliable" argument, when (ironically) we got fucked in 2021 because fossil fuels failed miserably, not the renewables, particularly with regard to expectations.

Believe me, I have a lot of concerns about renewable energy resources, but most of those concerns are economic, not technical. I am no longer in that business -- I'm developing a consumer electronic product -- and I just don't have the time or even interest in trying to dig into the various regulatory and subsidy issues that affect the true cost of all power resources to the customer. It's an intentionally tough nut to crack, and I'm not gonna be the one to do it.

Judge Roybeanbag · February 21

43 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

I'm developing a consumer electronic product

Tell us more about this AI Smart Dildo !

BrickHorn · February 21

2 hours ago, Leeroy Jenkins said:

There are multiple battery facilities getting built in Texas. There are two going through the approval process in Henderson County right now.

There are a lot more than that, when you consider that Bitcoin mines are just big batteries that constantly burn energy but don’t store any for later use.

Dammit. @Captainant beat me to it.

Edited February 21 by BrickHorn

Brisketexan · February 21

1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

only that you felt the need to point out that renewable sources sometimes fall outside supply expectations.

Ahhh, then you misread me, or I communicated it poorly. My point was NOT that "renewable" resources fall outside of supply expectations. It was that our full resource mix - including ALL types of generation - is intentionally insufficient with little to no margin for safety by virtue of our intentional market design. Yes, the "margin" is almost always going to have to be made up of reliable on-demand generation (batteries, nat gas, nuclear) because the very purpose of that last few percentage points is that it be reliable with on-demand availability. And yes, to the extent we expect that margin to be covered by natural gas, it needs to be with plants that have a reliable, winterized fuel source, WITH A CAP ON THE GAS PRICE BY CONTRACT.

Ghost of LL · February 21

And by the way, there is a very interesting briefing article in The Economist this week about the electrification of heavy industry.

Spoiler

Basf is in the business of molecules. As the world’s biggest chemicals firm, with operations in more than 90 countries, it makes a lot of them. When those molecules contain carbon atoms (and a great many do—they are a wonderfully versatile resource) those carbon atoms tend to come from fossil fuels. When their manufacture requires high temperatures, which is also often the case, that heat comes from burning fossil fuels. Until recently basf’s massive plant in Ludwigshafen in Germany accounted for 4% of the country’s entire consumption of natural gas.

Conventional wisdom has it that such a firm cannot really hope to lower very much the number of carbon-dioxide molecules it creates in the course of its business. The path to decarbonisation will come instead from gathering up those molecules and disposing of them underground, a process known as carbon capture and storage (ccs). The same conventional wisdom holds that if basf were to swear off burning molecules of gas to create heat, the obvious green alternative would be to burn hydrogen molecules instead. Those molecules would have to be manufactured, too, in an energy-intensive process.

That is why the recent declaration by Martin Brudermüller, the boss of basf, that “the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries can only be achieved through electrification” sounds, to many ears, like heresy. Electricity is for houses and light bulbs and maybe even for cars, but not for heavy industries built around burning heroic quantities of fossil fuel. Yet Dr Brudermüller is not alone.

basf has joined a consortium including sabic, a Saudi chemicals firm, and Linde, a European engineering firm, to develop an electric furnace that can generate heat intense enough for the chemical reactions that are their bread and butter. These firms are not the only recent converts to the electrification of industry. On February 8th Rio Tinto and bhp, both gargantuan mining firms, announced a joint effort to build Australia’s first electric smelter for iron ore. Fortescue, another mining giant, is introducing all-electric excavators and mining lorries, while Spain’s Roca Group recently unveiled the first electric industrial tunnel kiln for ceramics. Such innovations offer a new path to slowing global warming which may in many cases prove quicker and easier than approaches based on ccs and hydrogen.

Industrial fail

According to the International Energy Agency (iea), a research body, industry consumes a third of all global energy, with the generation of heat accounting for three-quarters of that. A staggering 90% of that heat is made by burning fossil fuels. All this makes industry a bigger source of greenhouse-gas emissions than power generation or transport. What is more, whereas carbon-dioxide emissions from power generation appear to have peaked and, if electric vehicles continue to proliferate, emissions from transport may soon stop growing, too, industrial emissions are projected to keep growing indefinitely (see chart 1).

image: the economist

Aware that this is impossible to square with their commitments to slash emissions, governments in advanced economies have showered subsidies on hydrogen and ccs as the technologies most likely to help decarbonise industry. Both, however, have so far disappointed. Electrification, meanwhile, had long been dismissed for two reasons. First, it was argued, the very high temperatures and steam required by heavy industry would be difficult or at least uneconomic to produce with electricity. Second, the standard ways of making cement and steel require carbon as an input, which means emitting carbon dioxide is unavoidable even if clean electricity were to replace the burning of fossil fuels.

Yet McKinsey, a consultancy, predicts that 44% of the decarbonisation it foresees in Europe by 2050, should the eu stick to its net-zero targets, will come from electrification, more than double the share of hydrogen and ccs combined. Why is it so optimistic about an unheralded technology?

Electrification is suddenly getting a second look for several reasons, argues Jeffrey Rissman in a new book: “Zero-Carbon Industry”. Most obviously, green electricity has become much cheaper and more widely available thanks to the remarkable decline in the cost of wind and solar power. Another factor is growing wariness of reliance on natural gas, thanks to the global price shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Supplies of gas ran so low in Germany, for example, that the government considered rationing it for industrial users like basf.

But the best reason for reconsideration is innovation. Making things hot with electricity is not that hard; think of an electric kettle. Such technologies can scale: if you want ten times as much boiling water, get ten kettles or one bigger one. But if you want to get to 1,000°C instead of 100°C, until recently there were few electric options. That is now changing.

Electric avenue

For temperatures of up to 200°C, the technology attracting most attention is not the electric kettle but the industrial heat pump. Heat pumps, like refrigerators, move heat from one place to another. In a fridge the heat is removed from the inside (keeping the contents cooler) and dumped outside (making the kitchen a little warmer). Heat pumps, which are becoming increasingly common for domestic heating, take heat from outside and move it inside. Because the amount of energy needed to move heat this way is lower than the amount needed to heat things up directly, this can lead to big energy savings. And as the technology improves and sales increase, prices are falling.

Some companies are betting that what works in the home can work in the factory, too. One such is AtmosZero, a startup that aims to reduce emissions at New Belgium Brewing, an American beermaker. AtmosZero is installing a heat pump that will soon replace one of the gas-fired boilers at New Belgium’s brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado. Like most industrial firms over the past 150 years, New Belgium burns fossil fuel to produce steam, which in its case then heats the ingredients required to make beer. AtmosZero’s heat pump will allow it to produce that steam without any burning. Since the electricity used to run the pump will be renewable in the future, that eliminates most greenhouse-gas emissions from the process. It is also more efficient, consuming less energy overall. And because the heat pump transfers warmth to water, just as in a conventional boiler, the equipment can be slotted into New Belgium’s existing factory, without the need for a complete overhaul.

image: the economist

Such heat pumps would allow a vast array of industrial processes that require heat of less than 200°C to be electrified, replacing fossil-fuelled dryers, stills, ovens and boilers. Using electricity to run a heat pump can be several times more efficient than using natural gas to heat a boiler. Using hydrogen, in contrast, is less efficient, because making hydrogen by splitting water molecules through hydrolysis powered by green electricity, although emission-free, involves a loss of at least 20% of the energy you started with (see chart 2).

Some industrial heat pumps are in use in Europe and Japan, thanks both to subsidies and to a relatively high ratio of gas prices to electricity prices. Kobe Steel, a big Japanese industrial firm, sells commercial heat pumps capable of producing high-pressure steam at 165°C very efficiently. Heaten, a Norwegian startup boasting investment from the venture arm of Shell, a British oil giant, has developed a durable, low-maintenance heat-pump that can harness waste industrial heat to reach temperatures of up to 200°C. That makes it attractive for industries from pharmaceuticals to textiles that need middling heat.

Even in developing countries in Asia, electrification of relatively low-heat industries is making headway, despite the region’s abundance of cheap coal and lack of subsidies, which makes it harder for heat pumps and the like to compete. rmi, a think-tank, calculates that some four-fifths of the increase in industrial electrification globally since 2014 has taken place in Chinese light industries. The iea predicts that the share of heat used in industry that is generated with electricity will rise from 4% in 2022 to almost 11% in 2028. China will account for almost half of that growth, boosting its use of renewable electricity to generate industrial heat more than five-fold.

In America, electrified solutions are making inroads even though natural gas is comparatively cheap. A study published in January by the Renewable Thermal Collaborative (rtc), an industry consortium, finds it costs no more to run a heat pump than a gas boiler when trying to attain temperatures below 130°C. That would make heat pumps competitive for 29% of industrial demand for heat, without any subsidy or technological improvements. The rtc expects heat pumps for temperatures of up to 200°C to become competitive by 2030. Harald Bauer of McKinsey expects that, in time, heat pumps will be able to reach temperatures of 500°C.

For the time being, however, higher temperatures require different technology. “You are looking at the future of industrial energy infrastructure right here!” declares John O’Donnell, the head of Rondo Energy, a startup developing “thermal storage”. At first glance, the future does not seem that remarkable: the object of his enthusiasm is a big metal box.

It mainly contains bricks. Wires use electricity to heat the bricks, much as a toaster does bread, to temperatures over 1,000°C. The bricks, helped by extremely effective insulation, can then retain heat for days with only minimal losses. When it is needed, the heat can be released in controlled doses at variable temperatures. Air is blown through channels in the bricks, transferring heat.

Rondo’s thermal batteries are cheaper to manufacture than electric ones that require cobalt or lithium. The heat stored is intense enough to power a lot of heavy industry. As with AtmosZero’s heat pumps, they can be slotted into existing factories without a complete redesign. And since each battery is so efficient, it can consume electricity to heat the bricks when power is cheapest but dispense heat any time.

The box is generating lots of enthusiasm. Rondo recently raised $60m in financing from the venture-capital arms of such corporate titans as Microsoft, a software colossus, Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, and Rio Tinto. It counts various luminaries of tech investing among its backers. After a widely viewed ted talk and a recent lecture to the great and the good at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr O’Donnell chuckles, he is known as “the brick guy”.

Mr O’Donnell is planning a big global expansion. With the help of Thailand’s Siam Cement Group, an investor with plenty of experience making bricks, Rondo hopes to manufacture enough boxes each year to store 90gwh of electricity—double the capacity of Tesla’s “gigafactory” for batteries in Nevada.

Other companies are developing variations of these “rocks in a box”. Brenmiller, an Israeli firm funded in part by the European Investment Bank, uses volcanic rock as a storage medium. Antora, a Californian startup, uses big cubes of solid carbon to store heat as intense as 1,800°C. Boston’s Fourth Power uses molten tin flowing through a system of graphite bricks (and graphite plumbing) to provide storage at 2,400°C. Because the tin glows white hot, specialised photovoltaic cells inside the system mean that energy can be withdrawn in the form of electricity as well as heat. In areas with variable power prices, it can run at a profit simply by storing heat when power is cheap and dispensing electricity when the price rises.

The hardest industrial processes to electrify are those that require intense heat around the clock, especially if they use fossil fuels not only to generate heat but also to provide some sort of chemical necessity—such as the carbon used in steelmaking. This is the most experimental end of the spectrum of electrifying industry, but also potentially the most rewarding, since steel, chemicals and cement together account for more than half of industrial heat and thus for a similar proportion of industrial emissions of greenhouse gases.

Several well-funded startups are pursuing radical innovations in aspects of steelmaking, one of the world’s most polluting industries. Electra, which is backed by Amazon and bhp among others, has found a way to make pure iron in a fire-free furnace. A picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator—who met a molten end in a steelworks—glares down at researchers at its laboratory in Colorado as they dissolve iron ore in a chemical cocktail and zap it with electricity. This “electrowinning” technique produces pure sheets of iron without using any coking coal or fossil fuels and so emitting hardly any greenhouse gases. The firm is chasing rivals including ssab, from Sweden, which plans to commercialise green steel by 2026.

Illustration of the aerial view of an Oil refinery plant with power extension cords making up some of the buildings

image: ricardo tomás

A more tried and tested method of reducing the carbon emissions from steelmaking replaces blast furnaces with electric-arc furnaces. These typically use electricity to melt and recycle scrap metal, rather than making steel from scratch using iron ore and coking coal. That makes the most sense in places with a carbon price, plenty of scrap and relatively stable demand for steel—rich countries, in other words. In January Tata Steel announced it would shut down blast furnaces and shift to electrified steelmaking in Britain. Wood Mackenzie, a research firm, predicts investment of $130bn in electric-arc furnaces in the coming years. That would allow low-emission steel production, currently 28% of global output, to rise to 50% by 2050.

Cement is another tricky industry to decarbonise because, like steelmaking, its emissions come from the chemical reactions involved, as well as from burning fossil fuels to generate heat. Sublime Systems has found a way to obtain the necessary chemicals without emissions at room temperature, using electrolysis—a process in which chemical reactions are stimulated by running an electric current through a solution. “We are basically replacing the kiln,” explains Leah Ellis, the firm’s co-founder. Investors including Siam Cement poured in $40m last year.

The third giant, sooty industry is chemicals. One radical form of electrification involves feeding chemical precursors into a super-speedy rotor, spinning at more than 20,000 revolutions a minute. Coolbrook, a Finnish firm, is pioneering this sort of “roto-dynamic reactor”. It is backed by Braskem, a Brazilian firm, Cemex, a Mexican one and sabic, a Saudi one. In December it announced it had used this technique to crack (break down) naphtha, a common process for the industry.

Some chemicals firms are also looking at nuclear power as a source of electricity and heat. Dow, an American one, plans to build four small modular reactors made by x-energy, a startup, at a plant in Texas. These will replace gas-fired boilers that currently provide electricity and steam.

Amping up

Even if such technologies work as advertised, electrifying industry will take time. Frederic Godemel of Schneider Electric, a big French manufacturer of industrial equipment, reckons existing technologies can in theory electrify 30% to 50% of heavy industry. In practice, however, he thinks only 10% is electrified now. That is because, even when new electrical kit is competitive over the long run with existing equipment, factory bosses often resist switching because it involves high upfront costs, disruptive stoppages, training on the new gear and so on.

Carbon pricing or other incentives to cut emissions would obviously help. So do technologies that minimise the disruption. Addison Stark, the chief executive of AtmosZero, has explained that his firm explicitly set out to overcome managers’ objections by designing its electric boiler to slot into existing factories easily and so reduce the hassles of installation. “Steam powered the first Industrial Revolution,” he declares, “and decarbonised steam will power the next one.”

One indication that electrification may live up to its promise is the interest shown by oil and gas companies, whose products the technology is intended to supplant. Equinor, Norway’s state-owned oil firm, has long been electrifying its offshore rigs to reduce the emissions involved in pumping for oil. Its most efficient offshore operations emit less than 1kg of carbon dioxide for every barrel of oil produced (or for the equivalent amount of gas) compared with a global average of 15kg a barrel. Oil firms drilling in America’s Permian basin, under pressure from regulators to cut emissions, are spending billions to replace conventional equipment prone to leaking methane (a potent greenhouse gas) with electric alternatives. If even the natural enemies of electrification can see its worth, its prospects must be decent.

Horn Under a Bad Sign · February 22

3 hours ago, Ghost of LL said:

And by the way, there is a very interesting briefing article in The Economist this week about the electrification of heavy industry.

Reveal hidden contents

Basf is in the business of molecules. As the world’s biggest chemicals firm, with operations in more than 90 countries, it makes a lot of them. When those molecules contain carbon atoms (and a great many do—they are a wonderfully versatile resource) those carbon atoms tend to come from fossil fuels. When their manufacture requires high temperatures, which is also often the case, that heat comes from burning fossil fuels. Until recently basf’s massive plant in Ludwigshafen in Germany accounted for 4% of the country’s entire consumption of natural gas.

Conventional wisdom has it that such a firm cannot really hope to lower very much the number of carbon-dioxide molecules it creates in the course of its business. The path to decarbonisation will come instead from gathering up those molecules and disposing of them underground, a process known as carbon capture and storage (ccs). The same conventional wisdom holds that if basf were to swear off burning molecules of gas to create heat, the obvious green alternative would be to burn hydrogen molecules instead. Those molecules would have to be manufactured, too, in an energy-intensive process.

That is why the recent declaration by Martin Brudermüller, the boss of basf, that “the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries can only be achieved through electrification” sounds, to many ears, like heresy. Electricity is for houses and light bulbs and maybe even for cars, but not for heavy industries built around burning heroic quantities of fossil fuel. Yet Dr Brudermüller is not alone.

basf has joined a consortium including sabic, a Saudi chemicals firm, and Linde, a European engineering firm, to develop an electric furnace that can generate heat intense enough for the chemical reactions that are their bread and butter. These firms are not the only recent converts to the electrification of industry. On February 8th Rio Tinto and bhp, both gargantuan mining firms, announced a joint effort to build Australia’s first electric smelter for iron ore. Fortescue, another mining giant, is introducing all-electric excavators and mining lorries, while Spain’s Roca Group recently unveiled the first electric industrial tunnel kiln for ceramics. Such innovations offer a new path to slowing global warming which may in many cases prove quicker and easier than approaches based on ccs and hydrogen.

Industrial fail

According to the International Energy Agency (iea), a research body, industry consumes a third of all global energy, with the generation of heat accounting for three-quarters of that. A staggering 90% of that heat is made by burning fossil fuels. All this makes industry a bigger source of greenhouse-gas emissions than power generation or transport. What is more, whereas carbon-dioxide emissions from power generation appear to have peaked and, if electric vehicles continue to proliferate, emissions from transport may soon stop growing, too, industrial emissions are projected to keep growing indefinitely (see chart 1).

image: the economist

Aware that this is impossible to square with their commitments to slash emissions, governments in advanced economies have showered subsidies on hydrogen and ccs as the technologies most likely to help decarbonise industry. Both, however, have so far disappointed. Electrification, meanwhile, had long been dismissed for two reasons. First, it was argued, the very high temperatures and steam required by heavy industry would be difficult or at least uneconomic to produce with electricity. Second, the standard ways of making cement and steel require carbon as an input, which means emitting carbon dioxide is unavoidable even if clean electricity were to replace the burning of fossil fuels.

Yet McKinsey, a consultancy, predicts that 44% of the decarbonisation it foresees in Europe by 2050, should the eu stick to its net-zero targets, will come from electrification, more than double the share of hydrogen and ccs combined. Why is it so optimistic about an unheralded technology?

Electrification is suddenly getting a second look for several reasons, argues Jeffrey Rissman in a new book: “Zero-Carbon Industry”. Most obviously, green electricity has become much cheaper and more widely available thanks to the remarkable decline in the cost of wind and solar power. Another factor is growing wariness of reliance on natural gas, thanks to the global price shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Supplies of gas ran so low in Germany, for example, that the government considered rationing it for industrial users like basf.

But the best reason for reconsideration is innovation. Making things hot with electricity is not that hard; think of an electric kettle. Such technologies can scale: if you want ten times as much boiling water, get ten kettles or one bigger one. But if you want to get to 1,000°C instead of 100°C, until recently there were few electric options. That is now changing.

Electric avenue

For temperatures of up to 200°C, the technology attracting most attention is not the electric kettle but the industrial heat pump. Heat pumps, like refrigerators, move heat from one place to another. In a fridge the heat is removed from the inside (keeping the contents cooler) and dumped outside (making the kitchen a little warmer). Heat pumps, which are becoming increasingly common for domestic heating, take heat from outside and move it inside. Because the amount of energy needed to move heat this way is lower than the amount needed to heat things up directly, this can lead to big energy savings. And as the technology improves and sales increase, prices are falling.

Some companies are betting that what works in the home can work in the factory, too. One such is AtmosZero, a startup that aims to reduce emissions at New Belgium Brewing, an American beermaker. AtmosZero is installing a heat pump that will soon replace one of the gas-fired boilers at New Belgium’s brewery in Fort Collins, Colorado. Like most industrial firms over the past 150 years, New Belgium burns fossil fuel to produce steam, which in its case then heats the ingredients required to make beer. AtmosZero’s heat pump will allow it to produce that steam without any burning. Since the electricity used to run the pump will be renewable in the future, that eliminates most greenhouse-gas emissions from the process. It is also more efficient, consuming less energy overall. And because the heat pump transfers warmth to water, just as in a conventional boiler, the equipment can be slotted into New Belgium’s existing factory, without the need for a complete overhaul.

image: the economist

Such heat pumps would allow a vast array of industrial processes that require heat of less than 200°C to be electrified, replacing fossil-fuelled dryers, stills, ovens and boilers. Using electricity to run a heat pump can be several times more efficient than using natural gas to heat a boiler. Using hydrogen, in contrast, is less efficient, because making hydrogen by splitting water molecules through hydrolysis powered by green electricity, although emission-free, involves a loss of at least 20% of the energy you started with (see chart 2).

Some industrial heat pumps are in use in Europe and Japan, thanks both to subsidies and to a relatively high ratio of gas prices to electricity prices. Kobe Steel, a big Japanese industrial firm, sells commercial heat pumps capable of producing high-pressure steam at 165°C very efficiently. Heaten, a Norwegian startup boasting investment from the venture arm of Shell, a British oil giant, has developed a durable, low-maintenance heat-pump that can harness waste industrial heat to reach temperatures of up to 200°C. That makes it attractive for industries from pharmaceuticals to textiles that need middling heat.

Even in developing countries in Asia, electrification of relatively low-heat industries is making headway, despite the region’s abundance of cheap coal and lack of subsidies, which makes it harder for heat pumps and the like to compete. rmi, a think-tank, calculates that some four-fifths of the increase in industrial electrification globally since 2014 has taken place in Chinese light industries. The iea predicts that the share of heat used in industry that is generated with electricity will rise from 4% in 2022 to almost 11% in 2028. China will account for almost half of that growth, boosting its use of renewable electricity to generate industrial heat more than five-fold.

In America, electrified solutions are making inroads even though natural gas is comparatively cheap. A study published in January by the Renewable Thermal Collaborative (rtc), an industry consortium, finds it costs no more to run a heat pump than a gas boiler when trying to attain temperatures below 130°C. That would make heat pumps competitive for 29% of industrial demand for heat, without any subsidy or technological improvements. The rtc expects heat pumps for temperatures of up to 200°C to become competitive by 2030. Harald Bauer of McKinsey expects that, in time, heat pumps will be able to reach temperatures of 500°C.

For the time being, however, higher temperatures require different technology. “You are looking at the future of industrial energy infrastructure right here!” declares John O’Donnell, the head of Rondo Energy, a startup developing “thermal storage”. At first glance, the future does not seem that remarkable: the object of his enthusiasm is a big metal box.

It mainly contains bricks. Wires use electricity to heat the bricks, much as a toaster does bread, to temperatures over 1,000°C. The bricks, helped by extremely effective insulation, can then retain heat for days with only minimal losses. When it is needed, the heat can be released in controlled doses at variable temperatures. Air is blown through channels in the bricks, transferring heat.

Rondo’s thermal batteries are cheaper to manufacture than electric ones that require cobalt or lithium. The heat stored is intense enough to power a lot of heavy industry. As with AtmosZero’s heat pumps, they can be slotted into existing factories without a complete redesign. And since each battery is so efficient, it can consume electricity to heat the bricks when power is cheapest but dispense heat any time.

The box is generating lots of enthusiasm. Rondo recently raised $60m in financing from the venture-capital arms of such corporate titans as Microsoft, a software colossus, Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, and Rio Tinto. It counts various luminaries of tech investing among its backers. After a widely viewed ted talk and a recent lecture to the great and the good at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Mr O’Donnell chuckles, he is known as “the brick guy”.

Mr O’Donnell is planning a big global expansion. With the help of Thailand’s Siam Cement Group, an investor with plenty of experience making bricks, Rondo hopes to manufacture enough boxes each year to store 90gwh of electricity—double the capacity of Tesla’s “gigafactory” for batteries in Nevada.

Other companies are developing variations of these “rocks in a box”. Brenmiller, an Israeli firm funded in part by the European Investment Bank, uses volcanic rock as a storage medium. Antora, a Californian startup, uses big cubes of solid carbon to store heat as intense as 1,800°C. Boston’s Fourth Power uses molten tin flowing through a system of graphite bricks (and graphite plumbing) to provide storage at 2,400°C. Because the tin glows white hot, specialised photovoltaic cells inside the system mean that energy can be withdrawn in the form of electricity as well as heat. In areas with variable power prices, it can run at a profit simply by storing heat when power is cheap and dispensing electricity when the price rises.

The hardest industrial processes to electrify are those that require intense heat around the clock, especially if they use fossil fuels not only to generate heat but also to provide some sort of chemical necessity—such as the carbon used in steelmaking. This is the most experimental end of the spectrum of electrifying industry, but also potentially the most rewarding, since steel, chemicals and cement together account for more than half of industrial heat and thus for a similar proportion of industrial emissions of greenhouse gases.

Several well-funded startups are pursuing radical innovations in aspects of steelmaking, one of the world’s most polluting industries. Electra, which is backed by Amazon and bhp among others, has found a way to make pure iron in a fire-free furnace. A picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator—who met a molten end in a steelworks—glares down at researchers at its laboratory in Colorado as they dissolve iron ore in a chemical cocktail and zap it with electricity. This “electrowinning” technique produces pure sheets of iron without using any coking coal or fossil fuels and so emitting hardly any greenhouse gases. The firm is chasing rivals including ssab, from Sweden, which plans to commercialise green steel by 2026.

image: ricardo tomás

A more tried and tested method of reducing the carbon emissions from steelmaking replaces blast furnaces with electric-arc furnaces. These typically use electricity to melt and recycle scrap metal, rather than making steel from scratch using iron ore and coking coal. That makes the most sense in places with a carbon price, plenty of scrap and relatively stable demand for steel—rich countries, in other words. In January Tata Steel announced it would shut down blast furnaces and shift to electrified steelmaking in Britain. Wood Mackenzie, a research firm, predicts investment of $130bn in electric-arc furnaces in the coming years. That would allow low-emission steel production, currently 28% of global output, to rise to 50% by 2050.

Cement is another tricky industry to decarbonise because, like steelmaking, its emissions come from the chemical reactions involved, as well as from burning fossil fuels to generate heat. Sublime Systems has found a way to obtain the necessary chemicals without emissions at room temperature, using electrolysis—a process in which chemical reactions are stimulated by running an electric current through a solution. “We are basically replacing the kiln,” explains Leah Ellis, the firm’s co-founder. Investors including Siam Cement poured in $40m last year.

The third giant, sooty industry is chemicals. One radical form of electrification involves feeding chemical precursors into a super-speedy rotor, spinning at more than 20,000 revolutions a minute. Coolbrook, a Finnish firm, is pioneering this sort of “roto-dynamic reactor”. It is backed by Braskem, a Brazilian firm, Cemex, a Mexican one and sabic, a Saudi one. In December it announced it had used this technique to crack (break down) naphtha, a common process for the industry.

Some chemicals firms are also looking at nuclear power as a source of electricity and heat. Dow, an American one, plans to build four small modular reactors made by x-energy, a startup, at a plant in Texas. These will replace gas-fired boilers that currently provide electricity and steam.

Amping up

Even if such technologies work as advertised, electrifying industry will take time. Frederic Godemel of Schneider Electric, a big French manufacturer of industrial equipment, reckons existing technologies can in theory electrify 30% to 50% of heavy industry. In practice, however, he thinks only 10% is electrified now. That is because, even when new electrical kit is competitive over the long run with existing equipment, factory bosses often resist switching because it involves high upfront costs, disruptive stoppages, training on the new gear and so on.

Carbon pricing or other incentives to cut emissions would obviously help. So do technologies that minimise the disruption. Addison Stark, the chief executive of AtmosZero, has explained that his firm explicitly set out to overcome managers’ objections by designing its electric boiler to slot into existing factories easily and so reduce the hassles of installation. “Steam powered the first Industrial Revolution,” he declares, “and decarbonised steam will power the next one.”

One indication that electrification may live up to its promise is the interest shown by oil and gas companies, whose products the technology is intended to supplant. Equinor, Norway’s state-owned oil firm, has long been electrifying its offshore rigs to reduce the emissions involved in pumping for oil. Its most efficient offshore operations emit less than 1kg of carbon dioxide for every barrel of oil produced (or for the equivalent amount of gas) compared with a global average of 15kg a barrel. Oil firms drilling in America’s Permian basin, under pressure from regulators to cut emissions, are spending billions to replace conventional equipment prone to leaking methane (a potent greenhouse gas) with electric alternatives. If even the natural enemies of electrification can see its worth, its prospects must be decent.

Unfortunately, we need a subrsciption to the Economist to read it.

Dnaguy · February 22

7 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

"Windless nights" is pretty much a red herring designed to strike fear into the hearts of the ignorant, and it's obvious what industry is stoking that fear. While any one local wind farm might see periodic reductions in power below baseline, the aggregate wind power generated across the grid is predictable and planned for.

Thems some fancy words. Probably one of those but g city libs who make kids read trans books and want to take our guns away.

Move along.

We have no use for anything outside our current worldview regardless of the facts in front of us.

Commie.

Dahobbs · February 22

17 minutes ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

Unfortunately, we need a subrsciption to the Economist to read it.

Click the spoiler tag amigo.

Dnaguy · February 22

Just now, Dahobbs said:

Click the spoiler tag amigo.

Yes but in dark mode, you savages who don’t post plain text make it impossible to read.

I believe that one day we aren’t judged for the color of our mode, but for the content of our quotations.

Leeroy Jenkins · February 22

Just curious, do you have to develop specialized firefighting plans in the event a battery barn catches fire?

We are supposed to get briefed on that by the company. I don’t have much in the way of details yet. Neither of them will be in my first due but we will be responding to one if it does catch fire.

Dahobbs · February 22

13 minutes ago, Dnaguy said:

Yes but in dark mode, you savages who don’t post plain text make it impossible to read.

I believe that one day we aren’t judged for the color of our mode, but for the content of our quotations.

Judge Roybeanbag · February 22

35 minutes ago, Leeroy Jenkins said:

We are supposed to get briefed on that by the company. I don’t have much in the way of details yet. Neither of them will be in my first due but we will be responding to one if it does catch fire.

Good luck. I now have to write instruction letters and apply stickers when we ship stuff with lithium ion batteries. Good times.

Dnaguy · February 22

37 minutes ago, Leeroy Jenkins said:

We are supposed to get briefed on that by the company. I don’t have much in the way of details yet. Neither of them will be in my first due but we will be responding to one if it does catch fire.

Pull, Aim, Squeeze, and Sweep.

You're welcome.

oh and bring a class b extinguisher.

That’s right. I’ve taken a CBT.

Judge Roybeanbag · February 22

48 minutes ago, Leeroy Jenkins said:

We are supposed to get briefed on that by the company. I don’t have much in the way of details yet. Neither of them will be in my first due but we will be responding to one if it does catch fire.

If it does, you better post video. Though I doubt it would be better than the rattlesnake den mess you had that one time.

WithoutAClue · February 22

this would have been more appropriate back in January but f it...

Slacks · February 22

1 hour ago, Horn Under a Bad Sign said:

Unfortunately, we need a subrsciption to the Economist to read it.

Let me guess, you don't subscribe to Financial Times, either.

Brisketexan · February 22

Let me guess, you don't subscribe to Financial Times, either.

Oh….well-played.

Judge Roybeanbag · February 22

8 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

How does this implement Holonomics, spinning toroids, and travelling waves? Asking for....you know.

I read this like five times, and I keep picturing the gypsy wagon in the Wizard of Oz, except he’s a traveling proctologist with an unlimited supply of propofol.

Edited February 22 by Judge Roybeanbag

Slacks · February 22

37 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Oh….well-played.

We have 20+ years with this crew. I have to represent the culture.

Post Oak · April 11

Pretty good podcast from Lewin and Nathan Johnson about the future of the grid. About an hour but pretty interesting and somewhat promising.

Johnson seems like a smart guy.

Here's the lede.

Following Winter Storm Uri, the Texas legislature worked to identify proposals that can increase the reliability of the ERCOT grid. In this week’s episode, State Senator Nathan Johnson, representing Senate District 16 in Dallas and a member of the Business and Commerce Committee overseeing ERCOT and the PUC, shares insights into the proposals that are reshaping Texas energy policy.

Central to Senator Johnson's efforts is the establishment of a fund aimed at creating microgrids at crucial facilities such as hospitals and police stations. This initiative, now part of the Texas Energy Fund via Senate Bill 2627, secured nearly $2 billion to bolster microgrid infrastructure after receiving approval from Texas voters in a constitutional amendment. Moreover, Senate Bill 1699, spearheaded by Senator Johnson, formalizes the collaboration between the Public Utility Commission and various stakeholders to implement virtual power plants and aggregated distributed energy resources programs, while also mandating the commission to enact measures for reducing residential energy consumption.

Beyond legislative achievements, the conversation delves into pressing topics such as transmission policy, the evolving dynamics between fossil fuels and renewables, the imperative for innovative regulatory frameworks and incentives for utilities, and the pivotal role of energy efficiency in shaping Texas' energy landscape.

https://castbox.fm/vb/691715803

Nice Guy Eddie · May 8

PSA. ERCOT is warning that electrical reserves will be lower on Wednesday because of the temps will hit 90 in many parts of Texas. An unheard of heat spell for Texas. As of now, they’re not asking us to conserve electricity especially if you are paying north of 15 cents per kWh.

SydneyCarton · May 8

12 hours ago, Nice Guy Eddie said:

PSA. ERCOT is warning that electrical reserves will be lower on Wednesday because of the temps will hit 90 in many parts of Texas. An unheard of heat spell for Texas. As of now, they’re not asking us to conserve electricity especially if you are paying north of 15 cents per kWh.

You think this is bad, wait until summer.

jimmyjazz · May 8

Renewable energy + nuclear energy now represent over 39% of the world's power generation:

Brisketexan · May 8

BUT CHINA! BUT COAL! WE SHOULDN'T DO GREEN ENERGY BECAUSE CHINA!

Right? Isn't that the message?

Francisco 2.0 · July 9

Thanks ERCOT!

https://time.com/6982015/bitcoin-mining-texas-health/

Quote

On an evening in December 2023, 43-year-old small business owner Sarah Rosenkranz collapsed in her home in Granbury, Texas and was rushed to the emergency room. Her heart pounded 200 beats per minute; her blood pressure spiked into hypertensive crisis; her skull throbbed. “It felt like my head was in a pressure vise being crushed,” she says. “That pain was worse than childbirth.”

Rosenkranz’s migraine lasted for five days. Doctors gave her several rounds of IV medication and painkiller shots, but nothing seemed to knock down the pain, she says. This was odd, especially because local doctors were similarly vexed when Indigo, Rosenkranz’s 5-year-old daughter, was taken to urgent care earlier that year, screaming that she felt a “red beam behind her eardrums.”

Quote

It didn’t occur to Sarah that these symptoms could be linked. But in January 2024, she walked into a town hall in Granbury and found a room full of people worn thin from strange, debilitating illnesses. A mother said her 8-year-old daughter was losing her hearing and fluids were leaking from her ears. Several women said they experienced fainting spells, including while driving on the highway. Others said they were wracked by debilitating vertigo and nausea, waking up in the middle of the night mid-vomit.

None of them knew what, exactly, was causing these symptoms. But they all shared a singular grievance: a dull aural hum had crept into their lives, which growled or roared depending on the time of day, rattling their windows and rendering them unable to sleep. The hum, local law enforcement had learned, was emanating from a Bitcoin mining facility that had recently moved into the area—and was exceeding legal noise ordinances on a daily basis.

Quote

Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least 10 people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms. The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor—ears, nose, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo—says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis.

Spoiler

Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least 10 people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms. The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor—ears, nose, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo—says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis.

“I’m sure it increases their cortisol and sugar levels, so you’re getting headaches, vertigo, and it snowballs from there,” Bhaloo says. “This thing is definitely causing a tremendous amount of stress. Everyone is just miserable about it.”

Not all data centers make noise. And industry insiders say they have a technical fix for the ones that do, which involves replacing their facilities’ loud air fans with much quieter liquid-based cooling solutions. But some of their touted methods, including “immersion cooling” in oil, are expensive and untested on a large scale.

A representative for Marathon Digital Holdings, the company that owns the mine, did not answer questions about health impacts, but told TIME that it is working to remove the noisy fans from the site. “By the end of 2024, we intend to have replaced the majority of air-cooled containers with immersion cooling, with no expansion required. Initial sound readings on immersion containers indicate favorable results in sound reduction and compliance with all relevant state noise ordinances,” they wrote in an email.

The number of commercial-scale Bitcoin mining operations in the U.S. has increased sharply over the last few years; there are now at least 137. Similar medical complaints have been registered near facilities in Arkansas and North Dakota. And the Bitcoin mining industry is urgently trying to push bills through state legislatures, including in Indiana and Missouri, which would exempt Bitcoin mines from local zoning or noise ordinances. In May, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a “Bitcoin Rights” bill to protect miners and prevent any future attempts to ban the industry.

While some Granbury residents are fiercely protesting the mine, many others feel powerless to alter the will of a company with legal, political, and financial might. And the data center industry at large is only growing more dominant, thanks to the twin forces of Bitcoin mining and AI, the latter which spends a vast amount of energy training generative models to find patterns in data sets. According to a recent report, data centers will use 8% of total U.S. power by 2030, up from 3% in 2022. And if operators continue to locate the centers near existing communities and prioritize profits above all else, then the story of Granbury could become the story of countless small towns across America.

Granbury sits about an hour southwest of Fort Worth in Hood County, which houses a mostly rural and Republican population of about 65,000 people. About a 15-minute drive south of Granbury’s charming historic town center—which includes a 19th-century opera house—lies a gas plant called Wolf Hollow II. Driving toward the plant on a windy, predawn morning in May, it rises out of the sky like an oil rig in a pitch-black ocean, lights ablaze.

But the glowing gas plant never caused substantial issues for the local residents. Rather, the problems started when Constellation Energy, which operated the plant, signed a deal in 2021 to power a new Bitcoin mining facility that would sit directly on its lot. The new facility consisted of 163 squat metal boxes resembling shipping containers, which housed a total of over 30,000 computers. These computers started running in the summer of 2022, and seemed to be switched on all day and night. As of December 2023, the Granbury mine is owned and operated by Marathon, one of the largest Bitcoin holders in the world.

The computers power a process called proof-of-work mining. Rather than relying on a central bank or governmental agency, Bitcoin is created, maintained, and guarded by watchdogs around the world known as miners, who prevent tampering through a complex cryptographic process and are rewarded with bitcoin for doing so. Bitcoin’s first supporters hoped that this new system would support a global digital currency that would bring freedom, financial fairness, and wealth to its adopters.

But the system also requires an immense and ever-increasing amount of electricity. While Bitcoin’s first miners were solo operators often working out of their bedrooms, the industry is now dominated by a handful of billion-dollar corporations who operate industrial-size server farms across the globe. In the month of March 2024 alone, the Bitcoin mining industry generated a record $2 billion in revenue.

Much of the American Bitcoin mining industry can now be found in Texas, home to giant power plants, lax regulation, and crypto-friendly politicians. In October 2021, Governor Greg Abbott hosted the lobbying group Texas Blockchain Council at the governor’s mansion. The group insisted that their industry would help the state’s overtaxed energy grid; that during energy crises, miners would be one of the few energy customers able to shut off upon request, provided that they were paid in exchange. After meeting with the lobbyists, Abbott tweeted that Texas would soon be the “#1 [state] for blockchain & cryptocurrency.” The following month, the Commissioners Court of Hood County approved the development of a cryptocurrency operation at Wolf Hollow. The owners promised local jobs and said that they would mostly use “stranded energy” that would otherwise go unused.

For months during 2022, Granbury residents Nick and Virginia Browning sat in their front yard watching the new metal boxes of the massive facility be installed in the dirt across the road. “It layered our houses with dust. We haven’t gotten it all out yet,” Nick Browning, 82, says.

The dust, it turns out, was just a prelude to the noise. In order to cool the machines, the site’s operators attached thousands of fans to the containers, which churned constantly, emitting a vicious buzz. As more machines were switched on, the noise sounded like a ceiling fan, then a leaf blower, then a jet engine. It consumed afternoon dog walks and revved through cloudless nights, vibrating the trailer homes of many of the low-income residents who live blocks from the facility. The noise floated miles down the winding Brazos river, through the lush golf courses in the gated community Pecan Plantation and past county lines.

At first, residents responded to the intrusion by vacating their porches, retreating inside, and turning up their fans and air conditioners to the max. But many still felt tremors in their beds—including Larry Potts, a 77-year-old retired pastor who lives up the road from the plant. Potts says he stopped sleeping and started losing hearing in both ears. In February, his heart gave out after another sleepless night; he was rushed to the hospital and kept alive by an external pacemaker. There, he was diagnosed with third degree atrioventricular block, hypertension, and depression.

“I’m sick of this world and all this mess around here,” he says he told his wife that day, referring to the Bitcoin mine’s noise. “We moved out here for the peace and quiet. But this has made me want to go.”

Some nearby residents say they haven’t been affected. But the number of strange medical emergencies in the area have piled up. In addition to Potts’ discharge papers, TIME reviewed medical records provided by several Granbury residents. Hospital notes from 72-year-old Geraldine Lathers’ three-day stay document new prescriptions for high blood pressure and vertigo. Jenna Hornbuckle, 38, lost hearing in her right ear and was diagnosed with heart failure; ear exams document her hearing loss along with that of her 8-year-old daughter Victoria, who contracted ear infections that forced doctors to place a tube in her ear. And Avari Burns, a 19-year-old cancer patient, says she suffered from crippling migraines at home—but whenever she went to a Fort Worth hospital for chemotherapy, the migraines subsided.

Virginia Browning, 81, who can see the Bitcoin mine from her front yard, says she was taken to urgent care with violent vertigo after waking up one night mid-vomit. Browning says she gets so dizzy she can barely walk in a straight line, and that she rarely sleeps through the night. "When they crank this thing,” she says shakily, “I’m wide awake.”

“We’re living in a nightmare,” Sarah Rosenkranz says, sitting at a barbecue restaurant in downtown Granbury on an evening in May. As rock music blares from the speakers and other patrons chatter away, Rosenkranz pulls out her phone and clocks 72 decibels on a sound meter app—the same level that she records in Indigo’s bedroom in the dead of night. In early 2023, her daughter began waking up, yelling and holding her ears. Indigo’s room directly faces the mine, which sits about a mile and a half away. She soon refused to sleep in her own room. She then developed so many ear infections that Rosenkranz pulled her from school in March and learned how to homeschool her for the rest of the semester.

Over grilled salmon and hush puppies, Rosenkranz shares that her family has been sleeping peacefully at an inn downtown for the last three days in order to get away from the noise. But the next morning, after returning home, she contracts yet another migraine that lands her in urgent care.

Dr. Bhaloo, the ENT doctor in Granbury, says he’s seen an uptick since the new year in patients whose ailments—including ringing in their ears, vertigo, and headaches—could be related to the mine. “These people here, they’re good country folks, and Bitcoin, to them, is almost a foreign alien thing,” he says. “They don’t understand it. And [the noise] is detrimental to their health and anxiety.” Dr. Stephen Krzeminski, another Granbury ENT, agrees. “Sonic damage is real, there’s no disputing that,” he says. Krzeminski says he believes the mine is causing “mental and physical” health issues. “Imagine if I had vuvuzela in your ear all the time,” he says.

The level of noise is appalling to Dr. Thomas Münzel, a German cardiologist who is a leader in the growing field of scientific researchers measuring the impact of urban and industrial noise on humans. For the last 15 years, Münzel has studied how transportation and urban noise, especially at night, can be debilitating stressors on the heart, brain, and cardiovascular systems. In one study, he exposed young, healthy students to noise events up to 63 decibels, and found that their vascular function diminished after just a single night. In other studies, he’s found that nighttime noise pollution directly leads to heart failure and molecular changes in the brain, which may lead to impaired cognitive development of children and make some people more prone to developing dementia.

“The European Environmental Agency tells us that everything above 55 decibels is making us sick,” he says. The fact that the Granbury Bitcoin mine is emitting 70 or even 90 decibels on a nightly basis is “like torture,” he says. “The most spectacular cardiovascular diseases will develop. They have to stop the machines.”

Health effects have the potential to extend past the human residents of Granbury. Studies have shown that man-made noise pollution harms animals and wildlife, causing oxidative stress and memory loss in rodents, acute anxiety in dogs, and a decrease in forest growth. Shenice Copenhaver’s dog, Persephone, started going bald and developed debilitating anxiety shortly after the Bitcoin mine began operating four blocks away. Directly next door, Tom Weeks’ dog Jack Rabbit Slim started shaking and hyperventilating uncontrollably for hours on end; a vet placed him on the seizure medication Gabapentin. Rosenkranz’s chickens stopped laying eggs for months. And Jerry and Patricia Campbell’s centuries-old oak tree, which had served as the family’s hub and protector for generations of backyard family reunions and even a wedding, died suddenly three months ago.

It’s nearly impossible to prove the Bitcoin mine directly caused the afflictions of these specific animals and plants. But as the strange anecdotes collect, they’ve added to the stress of a town that feels under siege from all directions.

“I’ve lived in Texas all my life and I’ve never seen an oak tree be beautiful one year and die the next,” Jerry Campbell says on his lawn, beneath the tree’s gnarled, blackened limbs. “It’s so strange.”

Hood County Constable John Shirley has spent months trying to find his own solutions to a problem that at times seems supernatural. As a former member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia whose leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy against the U.S. government, Shirley is a somewhat divisive figure in the town. But lately Shirley has been laser-focused on the mine—an issue he considers apolitical. “When you’ve got Greenpeace supporting the same cause as a former Oath Keeper, what weird episode of theTwilight Zone are we in?” he says, chuckling darkly. (Shirley resigned from the Oath Keepers before Jan. 6, 2021, due to “serious concerns” with the direction of the organization, he says.)

On a listless May morning before the sun has risen, Shirley is sitting in his truck across the road from the mine. He is used to getting up at this hour, as he’s been taking decibel readings of the plant around the clock in order to write tickets against the mine’s operators for disorderly conduct. Shirley sticks his recorder out the window and the numbers on it flicker up and down as the roar washes over it. Eventually, the recorder caps out at 91 decibels, which the CDC estimates as roughly in between the output of a lawnmower and a chainsaw.

This level of noise, the CDC writes, can cause hearing damage after two hours of exposure. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration advises that employees can only work in 90-decibel settings for eight hours a day and are required to wear ear protection. And Texas state penal code deems any noise above 85 decibels unreasonable. Over the course of 2024, Shirley has recorded a noise above 85 decibels coming from the plant more than 35 times.

Technically there is federal mandate to regulate noise, which stems from the 1972 Noise Control Act—but it was essentially de-funded during the Reagan administration. This leaves noise regulation up to states, cities, and counties. New York City, for instance, has a noise code which officially caps restaurant music and air conditioning at 42 decibels (as measured within a nearby residence). Texas’s 85 decibels, in contrast, is by far the loudest state limit in the nation, says Les Blomberg, the executive director of the nonprofit Noise Pollution Clearinghouse. “It is a level that protects noise polluters, not the noise polluted,” he says.

Ultimately, Constable John Shirley can’t stop the machines, because there is no state law forcing the operator of a noisy machine to turn it off. When Shirley writes a ticket for disorderly conduct, it merely triggers a $500 fine, as opposed to jail time or another punitive measure. Hood County can’t even pass a relevant noise ordinance law: only Texas cities, not counties, have the ability to do so.

Shirley’s tickets now add up to a theoretical fine of $17,500 and counting. But that number is chump change for Marathon, which earned $165 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2024 and bragged to shareholders about “record earnings.” And the company is fighting back: They have requested a jury trial to overturn this low-level misdemeanor, which starts July 8. At a pre-trial hearing in May, the company arrived with a full team of lawyers. “To bring two or three full-suited attorneys to a justice of the peace court citation issue: I’ve never seen that,” says Patrick Ryan, a local lawyer who has consulted with Granbury community members about the possibility of a civil nuisance lawsuit. “They’re coming with both barrels.”

A representative for Marathon declined several interview requests with TIME, saying that the company would refrain from commenting publicly until Constable Shirley’s “unwarranted” citations against the plant had been resolved. As Shirley sits outside the facility recording the pulsating drone, his nostrils flare, and his voice rises with impatience. “When I was a murder investigator and someone killed somebody, I had the law on my side,” he says. “With this, it’s like I'm swatting at a rhinoceros.” As he reads the decibel levels on his sound meter, a security guard from the facility steps out of his car and snaps pictures of Shirley’s truck in the dark.

The residents of Granbury feel they’ve been lied to. In 2023, the site’s previous operators, US Bitcoin Corp, constructed a wall around the mine almost 2,000 feet long and claimed that they had “solved the concern.” But Shirley says that the complaints from the community about the sound actually increased when the wall was nearing completion last fall. Since Marathon bought the facility outright in December, its hash rate, or computational power expended, has doubled.

As complaints mounted at the top of 2024, the company contended it did not know about the extent of the sound issues. “We are now the owners, but we are not the operator. USBTC is still the operator. Prior to the purchase, we were not aware of the noise issues,” a Marathon representative wrote to TIME in an email in January. “Now that we own the site and have been made aware of the issue, we are working to gather information and address the situation.”

But documents show that Marathon provided a $67 million loan in May 2021 to the site’s first formal owners, Compute North, to build out the site’s infrastructure, and Marathon’s purchase agreement of the site, dated December 15, 2023, clearly mentions the existence of the $1.9 million “sound wall” built several months prior.

As community complaints reached a fever pitch earlier this year, Marathon held a meet-and-greet on March 29—Good Friday, which rubbed many people in Granbury’s deeply religious community the wrong way. For the handful of people that did show up, Marathon laid out a noise mitigation plan which included turning off idle fans, moving some containers into liquid cooling by April 2024, and installing vegetation and trees around the perimeter.

In an emailed statement to TIME in late June, Marathon said that 58 air-cooled containers have been removed from the site, and pointed to a roadmap which vows to convert 50% of the site’s containers to immersion cooling by the end of the year. A representative for Constellation Energy, which owns the power plant that Marathon connects to, said in a statement that the company is “staying updated on [Marathon’s] efforts to respond to the concerns raised by neighbors… We will continue working closely with Marathon as they take actions to reduce their impacts.”

Marathon says that immersion cooling, in which computers are placed in tubs of oil, will largely fix the noise problem. But the technique has potential drawbacks, including the difficulty of regularly performing maintenance on a computer submerged in oil, says Kent Draper, the chief commercial officer of the Bitcoin and AI data center operator IREN. “Although it's been around for a long time in the industry, it's just not that widely adopted,” he says.

Even Marathon expressed skepticism about its ability to convert its many machines to immersion technology in a 2023 year-end SEC Report. “There is a risk we may not succeed in developing or deploying immersion-cooling at such a large scale to achieve sufficient cooling performance,” the company wrote.

In an email to TIME, Marathon wrote: “While we are confident in our ability to scale this new technology, it is our obligation, as a publicly traded company, to identify any potential risks from a financial perspective.”

Granbury community members are exploring political and legal avenues. A petition against the mine in Granbury and its “excessive and unhealthy noise” garnered 800 in-person signatures, and was brought by representatives to the Texas Republican state convention in San Antonio in May, with the hopes of gaining statewide support for some sort of ban. But two local elected officials, Nannette Samuelson and Shannon Wolf, say they tried to take the floor to stump for the issue, but weren’t given time to speak. Samuelson’s goal is now to pass resolutions in commissioners court prompting state senators to draft legislation.

Any statewide legislation is sure to hit significant headwinds, because the very idea of regulation runs contrary to many Texans’ political beliefs. “As constitutional conservatives, they have taken our core values and used that against us,” says Demetra Conrad, a city council member in the nearby town of Glen Rose.

Some community members are also exploring a potential civil nuisance suit against Marathon, in which they would seek an injunction against the company and/or damages. One affected woman, Cheryl Shadden—who has medically-documented hearing loss—has retained the nonprofit Earthjustice to examine potential litigative routes. Deputy managing attorney Mandy DeRoche says Earthjustice is exploring the possibility of taking its own sound readings near the site. The nonprofit has been involved in several lawsuits against crypto mining companies across the country.

“Historically, Bitcoin miners go to the cheapest source of electricity with the least amount of regulation, and they do the cheapest thing possible,” DeRoche says. “It's one of the reasons why noise pollution from crypto mining tends to be so much worse than traditionally-operated data center operators.”

As Bitcoin continues to gain value, miners are building progressively bigger operations, causing gas plants and other fossil fuel emitters to spring back into action. It is unclear whether states even have the energy capacity to support this new demand: In June, Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick tweeted that Texans “will ultimately pay the price” for the growth of crypto and AI data centers, writing that they “produce very few jobs compared to the incredible demands they place on our grid.” Regardless, Bitcoin lobbying groups areattempting to pass pro-Bitcoin-mining bills in state legislatures across the country, which would exempt similar operations from noise ordinances and local zoning laws. People have reported similar symptoms near Bitcoin mines in Arkansas and Williston, North Dakota. Ultimately, Granbury is just one canary of several in the proverbial mine.

In the week before this article’s publication, two more Granbury residents suffered from acute health crises. The first was Tom Weeks, the owner of the hyperventilating dog. On July 2, Weeks, 64, rose after another sleepless night of listening to the mine and realized he couldn’t breathe. He was rushed to a Fort Worth hospital, where he was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot blocking his lungs—and hooked up to an oxygen tank. Weeks was supposed to testify against Marathon in the jury trial, but is now physically unable to do so. “This whole thing is an eye opener for me into profit over people,” Weeks says in a phone call from the ICU.

The second person affected was the five-year-old Indigo Rosenkranz. On July 6, she suffered from a seizure and was taken to the emergency room, before being routed to a childrens’ hospital in Fort Worth for further testing. Her mother, Sarah, was terrified and now feels she has no choice but to get a second mortgage to move away from the mine. “A second one would really be a lot,” she says. “God will provide, though. He always sees us through.”

Edited July 9 by Francisco 2.0

Gap03 · July 9

17 minutes ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Thanks ERCOT!

https://time.com/6982015/bitcoin-mining-texas-health/

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Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least 10 people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms. The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor—ears, nose, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo—says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis.

“I’m sure it increases their cortisol and sugar levels, so you’re getting headaches, vertigo, and it snowballs from there,” Bhaloo says. “This thing is definitely causing a tremendous amount of stress. Everyone is just miserable about it.”

Not all data centers make noise. And industry insiders say they have a technical fix for the ones that do, which involves replacing their facilities’ loud air fans with much quieter liquid-based cooling solutions. But some of their touted methods, including “immersion cooling” in oil, are expensive and untested on a large scale.

A representative for Marathon Digital Holdings, the company that owns the mine, did not answer questions about health impacts, but told TIME that it is working to remove the noisy fans from the site. “By the end of 2024, we intend to have replaced the majority of air-cooled containers with immersion cooling, with no expansion required. Initial sound readings on immersion containers indicate favorable results in sound reduction and compliance with all relevant state noise ordinances,” they wrote in an email.

The number of commercial-scale Bitcoin mining operations in the U.S. has increased sharply over the last few years; there are now at least 137. Similar medical complaints have been registered near facilities in Arkansas and North Dakota. And the Bitcoin mining industry is urgently trying to push bills through state legislatures, including in Indiana and Missouri, which would exempt Bitcoin mines from local zoning or noise ordinances. In May, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a “Bitcoin Rights” bill to protect miners and prevent any future attempts to ban the industry.

While some Granbury residents are fiercely protesting the mine, many others feel powerless to alter the will of a company with legal, political, and financial might. And the data center industry at large is only growing more dominant, thanks to the twin forces of Bitcoin mining and AI, the latter which spends a vast amount of energy training generative models to find patterns in data sets. According to a recent report, data centers will use 8% of total U.S. power by 2030, up from 3% in 2022. And if operators continue to locate the centers near existing communities and prioritize profits above all else, then the story of Granbury could become the story of countless small towns across America.

Granbury sits about an hour southwest of Fort Worth in Hood County, which houses a mostly rural and Republican population of about 65,000 people. About a 15-minute drive south of Granbury’s charming historic town center—which includes a 19th-century opera house—lies a gas plant called Wolf Hollow II. Driving toward the plant on a windy, predawn morning in May, it rises out of the sky like an oil rig in a pitch-black ocean, lights ablaze.

But the glowing gas plant never caused substantial issues for the local residents. Rather, the problems started when Constellation Energy, which operated the plant, signed a deal in 2021 to power a new Bitcoin mining facility that would sit directly on its lot. The new facility consisted of 163 squat metal boxes resembling shipping containers, which housed a total of over 30,000 computers. These computers started running in the summer of 2022, and seemed to be switched on all day and night. As of December 2023, the Granbury mine is owned and operated by Marathon, one of the largest Bitcoin holders in the world.

The computers power a process called proof-of-work mining. Rather than relying on a central bank or governmental agency, Bitcoin is created, maintained, and guarded by watchdogs around the world known as miners, who prevent tampering through a complex cryptographic process and are rewarded with bitcoin for doing so. Bitcoin’s first supporters hoped that this new system would support a global digital currency that would bring freedom, financial fairness, and wealth to its adopters.

But the system also requires an immense and ever-increasing amount of electricity. While Bitcoin’s first miners were solo operators often working out of their bedrooms, the industry is now dominated by a handful of billion-dollar corporations who operate industrial-size server farms across the globe. In the month of March 2024 alone, the Bitcoin mining industry generated a record $2 billion in revenue.

Much of the American Bitcoin mining industry can now be found in Texas, home to giant power plants, lax regulation, and crypto-friendly politicians. In October 2021, Governor Greg Abbott hosted the lobbying group Texas Blockchain Council at the governor’s mansion. The group insisted that their industry would help the state’s overtaxed energy grid; that during energy crises, miners would be one of the few energy customers able to shut off upon request, provided that they were paid in exchange. After meeting with the lobbyists, Abbott tweeted that Texas would soon be the “#1 [state] for blockchain & cryptocurrency.” The following month, the Commissioners Court of Hood County approved the development of a cryptocurrency operation at Wolf Hollow. The owners promised local jobs and said that they would mostly use “stranded energy” that would otherwise go unused.

For months during 2022, Granbury residents Nick and Virginia Browning sat in their front yard watching the new metal boxes of the massive facility be installed in the dirt across the road. “It layered our houses with dust. We haven’t gotten it all out yet,” Nick Browning, 82, says.

The dust, it turns out, was just a prelude to the noise. In order to cool the machines, the site’s operators attached thousands of fans to the containers, which churned constantly, emitting a vicious buzz. As more machines were switched on, the noise sounded like a ceiling fan, then a leaf blower, then a jet engine. It consumed afternoon dog walks and revved through cloudless nights, vibrating the trailer homes of many of the low-income residents who live blocks from the facility. The noise floated miles down the winding Brazos river, through the lush golf courses in the gated community Pecan Plantation and past county lines.

At first, residents responded to the intrusion by vacating their porches, retreating inside, and turning up their fans and air conditioners to the max. But many still felt tremors in their beds—including Larry Potts, a 77-year-old retired pastor who lives up the road from the plant. Potts says he stopped sleeping and started losing hearing in both ears. In February, his heart gave out after another sleepless night; he was rushed to the hospital and kept alive by an external pacemaker. There, he was diagnosed with third degree atrioventricular block, hypertension, and depression.

“I’m sick of this world and all this mess around here,” he says he told his wife that day, referring to the Bitcoin mine’s noise. “We moved out here for the peace and quiet. But this has made me want to go.”

Some nearby residents say they haven’t been affected. But the number of strange medical emergencies in the area have piled up. In addition to Potts’ discharge papers, TIME reviewed medical records provided by several Granbury residents. Hospital notes from 72-year-old Geraldine Lathers’ three-day stay document new prescriptions for high blood pressure and vertigo. Jenna Hornbuckle, 38, lost hearing in her right ear and was diagnosed with heart failure; ear exams document her hearing loss along with that of her 8-year-old daughter Victoria, who contracted ear infections that forced doctors to place a tube in her ear. And Avari Burns, a 19-year-old cancer patient, says she suffered from crippling migraines at home—but whenever she went to a Fort Worth hospital for chemotherapy, the migraines subsided.

Virginia Browning, 81, who can see the Bitcoin mine from her front yard, says she was taken to urgent care with violent vertigo after waking up one night mid-vomit. Browning says she gets so dizzy she can barely walk in a straight line, and that she rarely sleeps through the night. "When they crank this thing,” she says shakily, “I’m wide awake.”

“We’re living in a nightmare,” Sarah Rosenkranz says, sitting at a barbecue restaurant in downtown Granbury on an evening in May. As rock music blares from the speakers and other patrons chatter away, Rosenkranz pulls out her phone and clocks 72 decibels on a sound meter app—the same level that she records in Indigo’s bedroom in the dead of night. In early 2023, her daughter began waking up, yelling and holding her ears. Indigo’s room directly faces the mine, which sits about a mile and a half away. She soon refused to sleep in her own room. She then developed so many ear infections that Rosenkranz pulled her from school in March and learned how to homeschool her for the rest of the semester.

Over grilled salmon and hush puppies, Rosenkranz shares that her family has been sleeping peacefully at an inn downtown for the last three days in order to get away from the noise. But the next morning, after returning home, she contracts yet another migraine that lands her in urgent care.

Dr. Bhaloo, the ENT doctor in Granbury, says he’s seen an uptick since the new year in patients whose ailments—including ringing in their ears, vertigo, and headaches—could be related to the mine. “These people here, they’re good country folks, and Bitcoin, to them, is almost a foreign alien thing,” he says. “They don’t understand it. And [the noise] is detrimental to their health and anxiety.” Dr. Stephen Krzeminski, another Granbury ENT, agrees. “Sonic damage is real, there’s no disputing that,” he says. Krzeminski says he believes the mine is causing “mental and physical” health issues. “Imagine if I had vuvuzela in your ear all the time,” he says.

The level of noise is appalling to Dr. Thomas Münzel, a German cardiologist who is a leader in the growing field of scientific researchers measuring the impact of urban and industrial noise on humans. For the last 15 years, Münzel has studied how transportation and urban noise, especially at night, can be debilitating stressors on the heart, brain, and cardiovascular systems. In one study, he exposed young, healthy students to noise events up to 63 decibels, and found that their vascular function diminished after just a single night. In other studies, he’s found that nighttime noise pollution directly leads to heart failure and molecular changes in the brain, which may lead to impaired cognitive development of children and make some people more prone to developing dementia.

“The European Environmental Agency tells us that everything above 55 decibels is making us sick,” he says. The fact that the Granbury Bitcoin mine is emitting 70 or even 90 decibels on a nightly basis is “like torture,” he says. “The most spectacular cardiovascular diseases will develop. They have to stop the machines.”

Health effects have the potential to extend past the human residents of Granbury. Studies have shown that man-made noise pollution harms animals and wildlife, causing oxidative stress and memory loss in rodents, acute anxiety in dogs, and a decrease in forest growth. Shenice Copenhaver’s dog, Persephone, started going bald and developed debilitating anxiety shortly after the Bitcoin mine began operating four blocks away. Directly next door, Tom Weeks’ dog Jack Rabbit Slim started shaking and hyperventilating uncontrollably for hours on end; a vet placed him on the seizure medication Gabapentin. Rosenkranz’s chickens stopped laying eggs for months. And Jerry and Patricia Campbell’s centuries-old oak tree, which had served as the family’s hub and protector for generations of backyard family reunions and even a wedding, died suddenly three months ago.

It’s nearly impossible to prove the Bitcoin mine directly caused the afflictions of these specific animals and plants. But as the strange anecdotes collect, they’ve added to the stress of a town that feels under siege from all directions.

“I’ve lived in Texas all my life and I’ve never seen an oak tree be beautiful one year and die the next,” Jerry Campbell says on his lawn, beneath the tree’s gnarled, blackened limbs. “It’s so strange.”

Hood County Constable John Shirley has spent months trying to find his own solutions to a problem that at times seems supernatural. As a former member of the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia whose leaders were convicted of seditious conspiracy against the U.S. government, Shirley is a somewhat divisive figure in the town. But lately Shirley has been laser-focused on the mine—an issue he considers apolitical. “When you’ve got Greenpeace supporting the same cause as a former Oath Keeper, what weird episode of theTwilight Zone are we in?” he says, chuckling darkly. (Shirley resigned from the Oath Keepers before Jan. 6, 2021, due to “serious concerns” with the direction of the organization, he says.)

On a listless May morning before the sun has risen, Shirley is sitting in his truck across the road from the mine. He is used to getting up at this hour, as he’s been taking decibel readings of the plant around the clock in order to write tickets against the mine’s operators for disorderly conduct. Shirley sticks his recorder out the window and the numbers on it flicker up and down as the roar washes over it. Eventually, the recorder caps out at 91 decibels, which the CDC estimates as roughly in between the output of a lawnmower and a chainsaw.

This level of noise, the CDC writes, can cause hearing damage after two hours of exposure. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration advises that employees can only work in 90-decibel settings for eight hours a day and are required to wear ear protection. And Texas state penal code deems any noise above 85 decibels unreasonable. Over the course of 2024, Shirley has recorded a noise above 85 decibels coming from the plant more than 35 times.

Technically there is federal mandate to regulate noise, which stems from the 1972 Noise Control Act—but it was essentially de-funded during the Reagan administration. This leaves noise regulation up to states, cities, and counties. New York City, for instance, has a noise code which officially caps restaurant music and air conditioning at 42 decibels (as measured within a nearby residence). Texas’s 85 decibels, in contrast, is by far the loudest state limit in the nation, says Les Blomberg, the executive director of the nonprofit Noise Pollution Clearinghouse. “It is a level that protects noise polluters, not the noise polluted,” he says.

Ultimately, Constable John Shirley can’t stop the machines, because there is no state law forcing the operator of a noisy machine to turn it off. When Shirley writes a ticket for disorderly conduct, it merely triggers a $500 fine, as opposed to jail time or another punitive measure. Hood County can’t even pass a relevant noise ordinance law: only Texas cities, not counties, have the ability to do so.

Shirley’s tickets now add up to a theoretical fine of $17,500 and counting. But that number is chump change for Marathon, which earned $165 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2024 and bragged to shareholders about “record earnings.” And the company is fighting back: They have requested a jury trial to overturn this low-level misdemeanor, which starts July 8. At a pre-trial hearing in May, the company arrived with a full team of lawyers. “To bring two or three full-suited attorneys to a justice of the peace court citation issue: I’ve never seen that,” says Patrick Ryan, a local lawyer who has consulted with Granbury community members about the possibility of a civil nuisance lawsuit. “They’re coming with both barrels.”

A representative for Marathon declined several interview requests with TIME, saying that the company would refrain from commenting publicly until Constable Shirley’s “unwarranted” citations against the plant had been resolved. As Shirley sits outside the facility recording the pulsating drone, his nostrils flare, and his voice rises with impatience. “When I was a murder investigator and someone killed somebody, I had the law on my side,” he says. “With this, it’s like I'm swatting at a rhinoceros.” As he reads the decibel levels on his sound meter, a security guard from the facility steps out of his car and snaps pictures of Shirley’s truck in the dark.

The residents of Granbury feel they’ve been lied to. In 2023, the site’s previous operators, US Bitcoin Corp, constructed a wall around the mine almost 2,000 feet long and claimed that they had “solved the concern.” But Shirley says that the complaints from the community about the sound actually increased when the wall was nearing completion last fall. Since Marathon bought the facility outright in December, its hash rate, or computational power expended, has doubled.

As complaints mounted at the top of 2024, the company contended it did not know about the extent of the sound issues. “We are now the owners, but we are not the operator. USBTC is still the operator. Prior to the purchase, we were not aware of the noise issues,” a Marathon representative wrote to TIME in an email in January. “Now that we own the site and have been made aware of the issue, we are working to gather information and address the situation.”

But documents show that Marathon provided a $67 million loan in May 2021 to the site’s first formal owners, Compute North, to build out the site’s infrastructure, and Marathon’s purchase agreement of the site, dated December 15, 2023, clearly mentions the existence of the $1.9 million “sound wall” built several months prior.

As community complaints reached a fever pitch earlier this year, Marathon held a meet-and-greet on March 29—Good Friday, which rubbed many people in Granbury’s deeply religious community the wrong way. For the handful of people that did show up, Marathon laid out a noise mitigation plan which included turning off idle fans, moving some containers into liquid cooling by April 2024, and installing vegetation and trees around the perimeter.

In an emailed statement to TIME in late June, Marathon said that 58 air-cooled containers have been removed from the site, and pointed to a roadmap which vows to convert 50% of the site’s containers to immersion cooling by the end of the year. A representative for Constellation Energy, which owns the power plant that Marathon connects to, said in a statement that the company is “staying updated on [Marathon’s] efforts to respond to the concerns raised by neighbors… We will continue working closely with Marathon as they take actions to reduce their impacts.”

Marathon says that immersion cooling, in which computers are placed in tubs of oil, will largely fix the noise problem. But the technique has potential drawbacks, including the difficulty of regularly performing maintenance on a computer submerged in oil, says Kent Draper, the chief commercial officer of the Bitcoin and AI data center operator IREN. “Although it's been around for a long time in the industry, it's just not that widely adopted,” he says.

Even Marathon expressed skepticism about its ability to convert its many machines to immersion technology in a 2023 year-end SEC Report. “There is a risk we may not succeed in developing or deploying immersion-cooling at such a large scale to achieve sufficient cooling performance,” the company wrote.

In an email to TIME, Marathon wrote: “While we are confident in our ability to scale this new technology, it is our obligation, as a publicly traded company, to identify any potential risks from a financial perspective.”

Granbury community members are exploring political and legal avenues. A petition against the mine in Granbury and its “excessive and unhealthy noise” garnered 800 in-person signatures, and was brought by representatives to the Texas Republican state convention in San Antonio in May, with the hopes of gaining statewide support for some sort of ban. But two local elected officials, Nannette Samuelson and Shannon Wolf, say they tried to take the floor to stump for the issue, but weren’t given time to speak. Samuelson’s goal is now to pass resolutions in commissioners court prompting state senators to draft legislation.

Any statewide legislation is sure to hit significant headwinds, because the very idea of regulation runs contrary to many Texans’ political beliefs. “As constitutional conservatives, they have taken our core values and used that against us,” says Demetra Conrad, a city council member in the nearby town of Glen Rose.

Some community members are also exploring a potential civil nuisance suit against Marathon, in which they would seek an injunction against the company and/or damages. One affected woman, Cheryl Shadden—who has medically-documented hearing loss—has retained the nonprofit Earthjustice to examine potential litigative routes. Deputy managing attorney Mandy DeRoche says Earthjustice is exploring the possibility of taking its own sound readings near the site. The nonprofit has been involved in several lawsuits against crypto mining companies across the country.

“Historically, Bitcoin miners go to the cheapest source of electricity with the least amount of regulation, and they do the cheapest thing possible,” DeRoche says. “It's one of the reasons why noise pollution from crypto mining tends to be so much worse than traditionally-operated data center operators.”

As Bitcoin continues to gain value, miners are building progressively bigger operations, causing gas plants and other fossil fuel emitters to spring back into action. It is unclear whether states even have the energy capacity to support this new demand: In June, Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick tweeted that Texans “will ultimately pay the price” for the growth of crypto and AI data centers, writing that they “produce very few jobs compared to the incredible demands they place on our grid.” Regardless, Bitcoin lobbying groups areattempting to pass pro-Bitcoin-mining bills in state legislatures across the country, which would exempt similar operations from noise ordinances and local zoning laws. People have reported similar symptoms near Bitcoin mines in Arkansas and Williston, North Dakota. Ultimately, Granbury is just one canary of several in the proverbial mine.

In the week before this article’s publication, two more Granbury residents suffered from acute health crises. The first was Tom Weeks, the owner of the hyperventilating dog. On July 2, Weeks, 64, rose after another sleepless night of listening to the mine and realized he couldn’t breathe. He was rushed to a Fort Worth hospital, where he was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism—a blood clot blocking his lungs—and hooked up to an oxygen tank. Weeks was supposed to testify against Marathon in the jury trial, but is now physically unable to do so. “This whole thing is an eye opener for me into profit over people,” Weeks says in a phone call from the ICU.

The second person affected was the five-year-old Indigo Rosenkranz. On July 6, she suffered from a seizure and was taken to the emergency room, before being routed to a childrens’ hospital in Fort Worth for further testing. Her mother, Sarah, was terrified and now feels she has no choice but to get a second mortgage to move away from the mine. “A second one would really be a lot,” she says. “God will provide, though. He always sees us through.”

Granbury votes like 80% Republican so ... leopards, faces, etc.

chainsaw · July 9

Fracking doesn't cause earthquakes, either.

- Dan Patrick (sent from Taiwan)

jimmyjazz · July 9

Why would a bitcoin mine be any different than any other data center?

Longhorn_Fan68 · July 9

4 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Why would a bitcoin mine be any different than any other data center?

from the googs:

Bitcoin mining data centers and traditional data centers have several differences, including their purpose, infrastructure, and cooling systems:
Purpose
Bitcoin mining data centers are custom-built facilities that house large-scale cryptocurrency mining operations. Traditional data centers, on the other hand, support multiple commercial uses, such as cloud computing and e-commerce.
Infrastructure
Bitcoin mining data centers are often modular, while traditional data centers have a static infrastructure.
Cooling systems
Bitcoin mining data centers need advanced cooling systems to manage the large amount of heat generated by mining processes. Traditional data centers may also need cooling, but mining servers can sometimes operate in temperatures as high as 90°F, which may reduce the need for cooling.

Brian Fantana · July 9

2 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Why would a bitcoin mine be any different than any other data center?

As far as noise pollution goes, they aren't much different. However, the level of noise pollution mitigation varies from center to center, some are better designed than others. It sounds like the one in Granbury probably has inadequate mitigation.

Captainant · July 9

8 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Why would a bitcoin mine be any different than any other data center?

I think it's mainly the operators of the DC, not the workload. Enterprise data centers wouldn't run such a shitty slapdash setup that they're emitting that much noise pollution, but some smash and grab get rich quick miner absolutely would cut those corners.

It's just wonderful our state has invited them in so aggressively

Francisco 2.0 · July 9

1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

Why would a bitcoin mine be any different than any other data center?

Enterprise datacenter are air conditioned.

This outfit built a bunch of sheds, filled them up with essentially computers that uses air for cooling, and then used large fans to pull and exhaust air into each shed. Everything inside is racked, without cases. Here's an aerial pic. If you zoom in, you can see by my count 14 large fan enclosures on the side of each shed. Now multiply that by how many sheds there are.

Here's a closeup of the shed, from a different bitcoin mine in Nebraska:

Also, Dan Patrick has seen the light, at least as far as bitcoin operations are concerned. He put this out on the twitters last month:

Quote

ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas and others gave shocking testimony today in the Senate Committee on Business & Commerce that within only six years (that’s only three legislative sessions), our power grid needs will grow from about 85,000 to 150,000 megawatts. That is much higher than the 110,000 megawatts they previously projected. The 110,000 megawatts was already a big increase, which is why the Senate pushed our incentive plan to build more dispatchable power last session. 150,000 megawatts is almost double the megawatts we now have on the grid. Later testimony said the growth is due to the increases in population, normal business growth, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, crypto miners and data centers will be responsible for over 50% of the added growth. We need to take a close look at those two industries. They produce very few jobs compared to the incredible demands they place on our grid. Crypto mining may actually make more money selling electricity back to the grid than from their crypto mining operations. Texans will ultimately pay the price. I’m more interested in building the grid to service customers in their homes, apartments, and normal businesses and keeping costs as low as possible for them instead of for very niche industries that have massive power demands and produce few jobs. We want data centers, but it can’t be the Wild Wild West of data centers and crypto miners crashing our grid and turning the lights off. The Senators asked why this had not been disclosed before today. #txlege

Edited July 9 by Francisco 2.0

jimmyjazz · July 9

Plenty of data centers in North America are cooled by ambient air, obviously at higher latitudes. Servers have cooling requirements, it wouldn't seem that the type of cooling would matter that much. I assume the noise pollution is coming off the servers themselves? Maybe bitcoin mines are much higher loaded than the average enterprise data center? I guess that would make sense given that the demand is much more predictable (i.e. 100% 24/7).

Brisketexan · July 9

Wait…they’re asking “why had this not been disclosed before today?” You mean something that the nimrods on this board have been talking about for 2-3 years? Something that has been covered in the media at length? Something that Senator Nathan Johnson has been talking about for 3 years, but he’s from the wrong party?

These fucking clowns.

Dnaguy · July 9

6 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Enterprise datacenter are air conditioned.

This outfit built a bunch of sheds, filled them up with essentially computers that uses air for cooling, and then used large fans to pull and exhaust air into each shed. Everything inside is racked, without cases. Here's an aerial pic. If you zoom in, you can see by my count 14 large fan enclosures on the side of each shed. Now multiply that by how many sheds there are.

Here's a closeup of the shed, from a different bitcoin mine in Nebraska:

Also, Dan Patrick has seen the light, at least as far as bitcoin operations are concerned. He put this out on the twitters last month:

Danny P not satisfied with his cut /. checks / donations now that Bitcoin is reaching new highs.

This is just a shot across the bow to get more $. Any good that his consternation brings is an unintended consequence

Edited July 9 by Dnaguy

tx 3 putt · July 9

7 hours ago, Brian Fantana said:

As far as noise pollution goes, they aren't much different. However, the level of noise pollution mitigation varies from center to center, some are better designed than others. It sounds like the one in Granbury probably has inadequate mitigation.

cheaply built facilities, with little building regs it sounds like

Captainant · July 9

Just now, tx 3 putt said:

cheaply built facilities, with little building regs it sounds like

BuSiNeSs FrIeNdLy StAtE

Js1 · July 9

2 minutes ago, Captainant said:

BuSiNeSs FrIeNdLy StAtE

Friendly to business owners

Hostile to its citizens

Dnaguy · July 9

10 minutes ago, Js1 said:

Friendly to business owners

Hostile to its citizens

Put it on the state crest!

The Royal We · October 4

I haven't seen this mentioned here yet, but I'm pretty shocked that Texas' leadership is making a good decision for a change.

https://electrek.co/2024/10/03/hell-froze-over-in-texas-us-grid-first-time/

Longhorn_Fan68 · October 4

Was just coming to post this with the tagline: wellity, wellity, wellity.

Edited October 4 by Longhorn_Fan68

royiv · October 4

53 minutes ago, The Royal We said:

I haven't seen this mentioned here yet, but I'm pretty shocked that Texas' leadership is making a good decision for a change.

https://electrek.co/2024/10/03/hell-froze-over-in-texas-us-grid-first-time/

The move to the SEC is now complete.

Sign In

ERCOT, PUC, and deregulation got us here

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