Seriously, this. They mention their wholesale rates to neighboring cities is so profitable it subsidizes the local rates.

Anywhere I’ve ever paid for power there’s a supply charge and a separate generation charge. TFA makes it sound like there’s no supply charge, only a generation charge. Well, no wonder they can’t afford to build out their grid?!

Their hydro generation is 3,000 megawatts (woah!). Add a supply charge of $0.01/kWh (possibly phased in after the first 500kWh/mo) and... problem solved? On 1,000 MW that’s $0.01 * 24 * 365 * 1,000,000 = $87 million!

I think I pay $0.15 / kW locally so we’re not even price gouging here.

Having excess electrical capacity in 2018 is a license to print money, this town is sitting on a gold mine with zero carbon emissions or ecological damage and they are complaining about it?

That is basically anti-net neutrality, but for energy, instead of information.

Why should I pay more if I use my laptop for mining crypto, instead of playing the latest AAA video game on the highest settings?

I believe the OP was saying power providers should charge slightly more for each cumulative kilowatt hour someone consumes. This way, the top 10% of consumers end up paying more per kW-hr than the median consumer.

The current situation has this reversed: the top consumers of power negotiate discounted rates. So while they use 1000 times more power than the average person, they only pay 70 times as much.

For some reason, it seems that lots of people find cryptocoin mining amoral. It's pretty unclear to me how they got there, but I can only guess that it's something like "free money" or a "get rich quick scheme." To think that I think is to discount the capital and operating expenses, to say nothing of the risk taken on.

To me, it's the fact that all this power, all these computing resources, are basically being thrown away. Nothing useful is done with the computational power. If it was doing something like folding proteins or otherwise using that computational power to better humanity, then it'd be different.

It's really not, though. It's just associated with something that "seems greedy". I could argue that "nothing useful is done with the computational power used for playing video games or watching and producing films." I could argue that, but I think that line of reasoning suffers the same way yours does. It requires a value judgment and you think that the cryptocoin eco system has no value.

Cryptocoins have tremendous value for remittances alone. We can argue whether it's optimal allocation of resources and I think that is a healthy debate. Mining is required for trustless, decentralized currencies with provably equitable distribution. But we could probably forfeit some of the latter and eliminate the proof-of-work entirely (in fact it's already been done). Another option is to make the proof-of-work of greater independent utility from the transaction itself (also has been done).

Because you're using more power.