This perfectly encapsulates exactly how wasteful and backwards PoW cryptocurrencies are. In a system that wasn't wasteful, adding in huge amounts of otherwise unused renewable energy would be a great thing because it'd mean more energy for doing useful work (i.e. processing transactions), instead, adding in all that extra energy actually decreases efficiency because everyone else must now work harder to process the same amount of transactions because of the increased difficulty rate caused by more people competing for block rewards. These new competitors don't actually add value to the network, they just make useful work more expensive from an energy perspective.

It's not a subsidy to renewables. Bitcoin miners don't give two shits about whether their energy is green or not.

You want to help level out peaks and troughs of electricty production: Improve battery technology, don't just waste the energy generating sha256 over and over.

It is a subsidy, in that this was free energy that renewables were unable to profit from, previously.

Before: The energy from a hydro plants gets wasted when it is night time.

After: Now they get money.

The hydro plant is now making money on something that they were just throwing away, previously, and thus it is a subsidy.

>Before: The energy from a hydro plants gets wasted when it is night time.

Hydro plants can usually turn off relatively quickly. They can be used as pump storage, which is an incredibly efficient way of storing energy - >70% efficiency [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...