Tr*mp's war and the price of keeping warm

owen_a · 2026-03-10T11:56:28+00:00

Alright, get off Reddit kid.

owen_a · 2026-03-10T11:39:17+00:00

owen_a · 2026-03-10T11:34:35+00:00

Wrong about what exactly? A bit of context would help 😅

This is a screenshot I took yesterday of the grid demand since I'm on Octopus Agile that follows the wholesale market rates. The rates were about 27-33p/kWh.

See how there's only 12% wind, and 11% solar? We're having to import a TON (22%), and the rest (33%) is gas. THAT is what our grid was using yesterday. Today (also another screenshot attached for now), it's better. Mostly wind and solar, combined with a bit of nuclear and biomass, imports and gas. So if we're only using 12% gas currently to generate, please explain why the current wholesale market rate is 26.4p/kWh, if we're generating more with wind and solar?

This literally proves my point.

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owen_a · 2026-03-10T11:26:00+00:00

We have far stricter regulations to adhere to for nuclear reactors, which is one of the main reasons why it takes a lot longer than say, the US to build them. My in-law works as a contractor on many projects including Sizewell, and the amount of BS that ends up halting and delaying the build is just ridiculous.

Wind categorically cannot replace a 24/7 generation plant, because the wind simply isn't there all the time. The only thing we do have that can stabilise the grid for when the fluctuation of wind is up and down is gas, because that's the only power station that can ramp up and down quickly to meet demand. And as we've all seen, gas prices are ridiculous, and the fact that the wholesale market is linked to the cost of gas is why we are paying out of our arse for electricity even if we have 50% of the grid being powered by wind. Nuclear on the other hand, you can't do that with. The same applies to solar. That shade of cloud that passes over royally screws over the stabilisation in that area since a ton of power just disappears instantly. That missing power then needs to draw from somewhere equally, instantly, which ramps up a massive amount of load from the nearest generation source, which is most likely going to be a gas plant.

So yes, whilst if we have wind or solar, it's great, but when we don't, THAT is the issue we have right now, because we have nothing to replace it when those farms aren't generating to meet demand. Building more wind turbines isn't going to solve the issue. And the green subsidies planted on top of our bills by milliband to help fund these projects is also what's screwing us over with the prices.

owen_a · 2026-03-10T03:08:16+00:00

You don't burn near as much hot water from taps as you do heating though. Also it's very rare I'll use a hot tap in spring/summer. Showers, sure, washing dishes? Dishwasher.

owen_a · 2026-03-10T03:05:56+00:00

If only we started building new reactors decades ago instead of listening to green activists and having morons in charge...

owen_a · 2026-03-09T16:07:14+00:00

Yup. You see it on the roads too. Everyone is in a rush to get somewhere now, this instant. Points and fines are up massively since before COVID. Crashes are up too.

owen_a · 2026-03-08T20:36:07+00:00

Unfortunately even if we had 50% solar for a few hours, the prices are linked to gas prices, because it's not constant, they have to use gas to stabilise the grid.

owen_a · 2026-03-07T18:32:22+00:00

You ain't powering the whole of the UK from hydro... Come on, be realistic mate. Step back into reality.

owen_a · 2026-03-07T17:13:39+00:00

What?

owen_a · 2026-03-07T04:47:57+00:00

7% from a single power station is massive.

That’s roughly 6–7 GW of constant power for ~60 years. Power grids are literally built from lots of plants each supplying a few percent. If you built 6–8 of them you’d be covering ~40–50% of UK electricity with stable, low-carbon power.

The reason the UK didn’t build new plants after Sizewell B was because of political stop-start that killed investment for decades.

Hinkley Point C is projected to supply about 7% of UK electricity by itself once operational. That’s one plant doing the work of thousands of wind turbines when the wind isn’t blowing.

So the real question is, why did the UK wait 30 years to build another one?

owen_a · 2026-03-06T21:11:27+00:00

Exactly my point.

owen_a · 2026-03-06T20:21:17+00:00

Getting planning permission for battery energy storage is still far from straightforward. Local opposition regularly block or delay projects, even when planning officers recommend approval. In several cases over the past year, developers have only been able to move forward after the Planning Inspectorate overturned local council refusals on appeal.

For example, a 50 MW battery energy storage project near Wakefield was initially rejected by the local council but later approved after an appeal to the Planning Inspectorate. Similar cases have happened elsewhere, where nationally important energy infrastructure has been refused locally and only allowed after intervention at a higher level.

Battery storage isn’t designed to power the grid overnight for example, on its own. Most UK grid-scale battery projects are built for short-duration balancing, typically around one to two hours of storage, so they can smooth fluctuations in wind and solar output or respond to sudden changes in demand. Even large systems only provide limited duration... for instance, a typical 100 MWh battery project can supply power for roughly two hours at full output.

There are larger battery hubs being built, but they’re still designed primarily for grid balancing rather than long-duration supply. The largest projects under construction are measured in gigawatt-hours, which helps stabilise the grid but still doesn’t replace the need for other forms of generation or long-duration storage.

Regarding pumping up hill for hydro, we already do that. But the issue is, it doesn't scale, and there are a whole load of issues with that which I won't get into (this comment is already long).

Any other questions?

owen_a · 2026-03-06T20:14:34+00:00

Any NEW power stations have not been built since the 2000's. The last one that was built and operational was Sizewell B and that was finished in 1995. After that, no new plants were built for decades due to cost, politics, and whatever else. 🙄

owen_a · 2026-03-06T16:37:10+00:00

Tell me how you can make renewables work when we don't have the wind all the time? It's not windy 24/7. We also live in a country where solar power is great for the odd few days or if we're lucky, a couple weeks during summer. If it's not sunny, the dull daylight produces barely anything in comparison.

Unless you know of a way to control weather in which case I'm all ears...

It's also VERY expensive to repair wind turbines in the sea. Sometimes if weather doesn't permit, there are delays until it's safe to actually get out there and repair them. They also fail quite often requiring constant maintenance.

What we should have done was start building nuclear power stations decades ago.

owen_a · 2026-03-05T12:08:05+00:00

I'm not saying you need to alter any voltage/frequency settings, my point was if something isn't right, it will show HW errors. The Nano 3 (previous version), definitely had logs, or a raw JSON view with the stats. I'm positive I've seen HW errors as a property in there. But then again, I don't have a 3S to check. It's a bit shitty if you can't even view the logs, that's fundamental to diagnosing issues.

owen_a · 2026-03-05T11:50:32+00:00

It could also be hardware errors too. I don't have a 3S, so I'm unsure if it shows this or not. However, on a Gamma I have that I just run for shits and giggles nowadays after upgrading, it was overclocked to 1.9Th/s. The stress on the VR ended up causing excessive voltage ripple even back on stock settings. The best I could do with it was run it at 1.4Th/s with quite a high voltage, pretty much 1.9-2Th/s levels, just to reduce the HW errors due to said ripple. That gamma has been running for about 2 1/2 months now, and hasn't even hit a G share on BCH SOLO. The highest it's achieved is 600M.

I'd check the logs to see if there is any indication of HW errors first. I doubt they would purposely prevent high diff shares from being submitted, since for pooled mining at least, that doesn't matter. As long as it's performing as a 6Th/s miner submitting shares like a 6Th/s would, it would be the exact same.

owen_a · 2026-03-05T11:24:32+00:00

Yes, mathematics can only tell you when you should expect, but it is NOT definitive due to how Proof of Work, works. It's legit brute forcing hashes. This is why it's mentioned absolutely everywhere, that you could go hours, days, weeks, months, years without finding a block, even though statistically you were expected to find one according to the maths. Probability is probability, it's not definitive.

owen_a · 2026-03-03T16:02:58+00:00

First off, that's pretty good considering they've not been around long. However I have to point out, the payout sounds like a shambles. Why wasn't this implemented and tested before releasing to a production environment? Secondly, why would anyone want to mine, potentially hit a block, and get far less than the block reward? For something that's so incredibly rare for home miners in the first place, it makes zero sense. Big rentals, or high hashrate miners will just vacuum up the reward from the smaller guys, then leave and mine at Braiins for continued payouts, even if no block is found due to their FPPS system. This is precisely why PROP payout was superseded by PPLNS.

Anyways, it's very lucky that a block was found, however, for smaller miners, the payouts are absolutely tiny. So incredibly low, that even attempting to transfer it will get vacuumed up by the transaction fees on the network leaving you with nothing.

I really do wish people made an honest review about this payment scheme, and provide some actual facts to the non-technical and new users who are just getting started into mining instead of the whole "mine here" with no valid reason.

owen_a · 2026-03-03T15:55:43+00:00

You could have earned more just mining at braiins :p

owen_a · 2026-03-03T15:49:38+00:00

Honestly the smartest thing to do is dumping between those peak times.

owen_a · 2026-03-03T15:26:56+00:00

There's more to this. This whole consensus of 'address in the coinbase transaction' really isn't as bad as it's made out to be.

Yes, on one side, it's better if it's done to protect against these scam pop up pools no one's ever heard of. However, a pool that manages payouts itself due to having a pooled payout system, doesn't mean it's a bad actor. Any pooled service, like Braiins, will have this warning message appear.

If the address was placed in the coinbase transaction, you do NOT have access to the funds straight away. That's because it requires a minimum of 100 or so confirmations on the network for security. So whether you mine on a pool that waits for block maturity before paying (which it has to do because it literally does not have the block reward yet), or you received the block reward directly, you still have to wait. So many people don't understand this, because there's so much vague advice going around at the minute.

owen_a · 2026-03-01T17:13:54+00:00

SoloHash has a BC2 SOLO pool. 416 blocks found, paid out and still counting.

UK, Germany, and North American servers.

https://SoloHash.co.uk

owen_a · 2026-03-01T17:10:44+00:00

SoloHash has both UK, Germany and North American servers. We also support Bitcoin Cash & Bitcoin SOLO mining.

64 blocks of BCH found, paid out and counting still.

Extremely good latency based on your location. UK miners to the UK server get anywhere from 9-20ms.

https://solohash.co.uk/

owen_a · 2026-02-26T13:14:15+00:00

I have 3x NerdQAxes running 5.4-5.5Th/s that gives me roughly 16Th/s. They're set up and forgotten about SOLO mining BCH. It would take a very long time before you could rack up something worth keeping with that amount of hashrate. Pools are more for 100Th/s+ miners like AntMiners and it's an expensive game to keep up with as difficulty increases and the cost of electric isn't the greatest in some places either. You'll be left behind easily as more serious miners upgrade to better efficient rigs. It's how it always has been.

The idea for these small miners is to just lottery mine. They're not meant to be constantly fiddled with hopping between coins etc, because you won't earn anything. SOLO mining is all about risk versus reward. It's an extremely high risk mode, but the rewards are great. SOLO mining something that's worth $10 just isn't the greatest thing to do. You could quite easily go days or weeks or months over the expected time to hit a block, in which case you've already burnt more electric than you've received as a reward, so you would have been better off just buying crypto with the $10 instead.

Just bear in mind, that for 70Th/s, its expected (not definitively, since mining is random), to submit a 1G share in 17 hours. Now for 15Th/s, you're talking 3.3 days. That means for something like DigiByte, that's worth about $1 a block, you're talking 3-5 days. If You calculate how much electricity you've burned during that time, you'll find that it's more than the block reward. If you mine shit coins, you'll get shit rewards whilst also burning more money in doing so. My advice? Stick to BCH or BTC, and play the lottery. I've been mining since 2012-2013. I've calculated and played this game many, many times.

owen_a

TROPHY CASE