I'm curious here about what, if anything, these these negative electricity prices might mean for cryptocurrency mining and transaction processing. How feasible would it be to set up compute infrastructure that "soaks up" the extra power in the German market, but is -- presumably -- idle a lot of the time? For example, is this a good application for distributed networks that piggy-back on top of other peoples' computers (with permission, of course). See, for example, historical examples like SETI@home, Folding@home, and Popular Power.
This is theoretically perfectly feasible. Currently, however, the capital costs of mining equipment are so high that it doesn't make sense to keep them offline.
And if you don't have to pay any capital costs, because you are running a massive, opt-in, decentralized pool of compute resources that other people own ... ? :-)
Most coin mining is not practical on home computing devices. Wasting the power generation in this way isn't necessarily the best investment of the surplus power.
Also... realize that this is power to the local utilities is negative cost - not the power to someone's home. They're still paying retail rates. I would be most disappointed to have the power utility turn on something that causes me to consume more power (be it cryptocurrency or all the lights in my house) when I'm still paying retail rates.
For all we know the Chinese coin miners you are competing with already pay nothing for their energy, 24/7. And in the grand scheme of things, despite alarmist opeds in the NYT, computers or cryptocurrency miners are simply not big energy consumers where the opex for buying them only to have them sit idle for rare negative energy prices would somehow make you come out on top. You are looking to sink gigawatts here.
For some actual numbers, http://www.theenergycollective.com/lindsay-wilson/279126/ave... shows the cost of electricity around the world... though thats over the entire country (Pacific northwest is cheaper than other places). I would expect that the Three Gorges dam (22 MW capacity - for comparison the Grand Coulee Dam is 6.8 MW and is the largest hydroelectric power in the US (Hoover is 2 MW)- the run of the river dams on the Columbia are in the 2 MW to 1 MW range). Historically, Pacific Northwest power has been as low as $0.0308 and $0.0245 / kWh. Its a bit more now, but still lower than the national average.
If its not free (the implications of corruption in Chinese government are made here), the retail power cost is going to be low, commercial is lower, wholesale is going to be lower still. Its probably a bit cheaper than the historic Pacific Northwest rates.
"partnerships / kickbacks" means that the "miners" are a larger team than just the people at the mining factory --- the team includes the power company and their funders, who are paying.
