Europes energy costs x5 and above, any thoughts and plans?

#1

Hello all!

I just thought about the energy costs I have to be aware.

My personal situation:
In Austria right now I just pay my regular monthly basis like before the Russian war. But in the background the prices are higher and they calculate much more, I have then to payback a lot more if the year is over…

So they say the energy costs are 5x higher than normal. Right now I pay 300€ a month.

calculation
For my 3 servers I get around 15000 TFT each month.
For the actual TFT prize this is around 450€ each month.

So if I would pay 300€ for energy the 450€ is okey for me.

But the energy costs would be around 5x300€ = 1500€ each month.

Thats not possible anymore… I have to shutdown my servers right now.
Even without the servers I cant afford that anymore…

Plans?:
Are there any decisions or plans to handle such crisis’s? war, climate, pandemic, what ever.

So for example, to calculate down the energy costs against the token price… and automatically adjust the rate you get in TFT like the energy costs are on the planet… maybe a bit more accurate so depending on in which country your servers are located? I bet there are markers out there over an api where you can get energy costs from every country on the planet

Thanks greets flow

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#2

I think you made a very important point I. Saying you can’t afford those prices even without the servers. The reality is that no project could possibly have a solution to the energy crisis right now when most of us earth occupants are at the point that if we had to pay the full prices for energy, we wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on

#3

Hi,

I am in Europe as well. Last year was the first year that I had to pay extra for my energy bill. The reason why was that I did start mining/farming crypto and it was a bad year for my sun panels. Plus the co-op windmill shares I have, didn’t perform as well either. But I have to say, those were my best investments so far. I used to pay hardly anything for electricity, except for taxes and maintenance fees for the co-op windmill shares.
This year is going to be a challenge, my energy bill has gone up from about 180euro to 430euro/month (most of that is for gas). Part of this is because the electricity cost has gone up from 0.22euro/kwh to about 0.5euro/kwh. Now, I am considering upgrading my older 250watt panels to 350 or higher watt panels.
To come back to your issue. I would suggest to invest in sun panels and/or co-op windmill shares. I had my investment earned back in about 7 years, but I paid higher prices compared to what they cost now. Also, I upgraded a lot in my house to lower the consumption of electricity. For example, my house only has led lights.
I wish you success in your move forward to tackle this issue!

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#4

Hey @flowmotion, great you brougth up that topic. I’m also very concerned about the recent development of electricity costs. I doubt that energy markets will relax to soon. When it comes to TF I think this is going to be very challenging for the growth of the grid. Also the fact that there is no consideration of (variable) electricity costs in the rewarding structure makes me worried. In my opinion we need to establish additional rewarding structures depending on utilization (like it is already implemented for networking traffic on public IPs). For now it would the best for farmers to avoid attention and aim for as little as possible utilization which would increase energy consumption. Of course that sounds stupid but is in fact the best “economically” way at the moment, espacialy in regard to the current TFT value. I think we need to find more incentives for nodes beeing utilized. And I guess this has to be adressed urgent.

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#5

I think the main think is the token price. If it can stabilise at 8c or even better at 15c that won’t be a problem. Hopefully the token will get some traction with the utilisation.
Regarding the solar panels its a tricky one. Because with the some money if you do DIY you would ROI in 6 or 12 months.

#6

That sounds nice, im also into renewable energy stuff, but by now i have no place for it. I live in a small flat at the border to vienna with much trees around me. And i think my monthly salary isnt enough to invest in sharings, as i said i cant afford the energy for the servers right now. But i want hear more about it cause it sounds interesting how to i have something back from investing in such stuff. Do you have a link?

#7

Yeah you are totally right. Nothing to add xD

#8

The token price is one thing but energy costs fluctuate too, but not even with the token price. So in my opinion these should adressed separately.

These times are the best test environment. Token price goes down and energy costs up… The worst case…

#9

Hi all!
I suggest everyone to move their nodes to Kazakhstan. It will be like a temporary solution.
The electricity cost varies from 0,018 euro/kwh to 0,061 euro/kwh depending on the city.
It may be will be a little more expensive if you install you node in the data centre but not much.

#10

Thanks for the hint, but to do this all in one country goes around the aim of tf in my opinion.

And I love my country :wink:

In the past I already heared some negative news about btc farmers in Kazakhstan…

#11

We’ve always had an intention to adjust the requirements for minting around geographical concerns. That’s mainly been focused around easing uptime and bandwidth requirements in regions which have less robust infrastructure.

When it comes to electricity costs, we definitely have an issue when it becomes more expensive to power nodes (even at idle) than the market price of the tokens you earn. Even in places with lower power costs, there’s still a crossover point at a certain token price.

One goal for the ThreeFold Grid is to be more “disaster proof” than existing centralized models. This won’t work if capacity concentrates where electricity is less expensive or goes offline in certain areas when electric prices increase.

I like the idea of offering relief to farmers who are impacted by situations like yours, @flowmotion. Indeed, there are resources that could help link farmers’ locations with their power costs and the system could scale rewards accordingly. The biggest problem I see with an approach like this right now is that it creates an incentive for farmers to fake their location in order to receive greater rewards. Creating a system that’s resistant to abuse is the real trick.

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#12

Hadn’t even gotten to this part reading and was already thinking how people are going to be spoofing their location.

#13

Is it possible to fake the node location? You can ever track the real position because of the IP-addresses. I think its not really possible to give a VPN before the nodes. And if yes it would impact the node performance enormous. If under 1% of the farmer are faking maybe this is ok.

but as you said the trick is to create an abuse resistant system. There are ways I bet :smiley:

#14

Well… technically it is pretty easy to spoof locations. There are different ways to do so… VPN would be one of course. When using appropriate hardware (nothing special, just enough CPU power on the VPN servers/routers and proper bandwith) there would be nearly no impact on performance… only a little extra on transmission time. I guess it would be a difficult one to make the TF system resistant to this.

#15

Yes, a VPN at the router can be setup with relative ease. @flowmotion, you might find in this case that your nodes become popular for deployments… of the other end of the VPN tunnel :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Of course this would be terrible for network performance on those nodes, but we don’t currently measure network performance at all. Ping time would a potential giveaway, but probably not accurate enough to distinguish nearby nations reliably.

I remember discussing the potential for location spoofing with @weynandkuijpers a while ago. He mentioned an idea for a USB device that would be responsible for booting the node but also include GPS based geolocation.

That’s a “someday” solution though. I had this idea about “farmers helping farmers”, where we could do it in a manual and voluntary way that doesn’t involve changing the reward structure. Many farmers are still feeling squeezed at the current token price versus their normal electricity rates, but maybe enough would be willing to help out in an exceptional case like this.

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#16

I think for now we are safe. There are no major reward or farming differences between geolocations, so to what purpose would you as a farmer invest i spoofing (beyond the hacker challenge etc).

Technology will help, and a USB GPS device integrated at some point to feed zero-os with information is considered.

What I have seen in the field with organisations and single developers that are working on deployments and application setups is that they look and ask for direct contact with Farmers to build a trust relationship, farmer to developer. This is very well possible in a decentralized setup. Today this is manual and forum based, but in the future we can opt in two make this a feature/button somewhere: “Talk to you farmer…” :slight_smile:

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#17

The argument for different payout ratios depending on electricity costs can be carried on many different levels. Some can use solar power. In some countries incentives and tax credits are in place. Then sunny days may of course not be that many depending on your location. I have relatively cheap electricity but due to my location I consume a lot.

I can say this. I pay 15 US cents per KWh. I pay around $600/month in electricity in the summer due to the air conditioning power consumption and I can’t just keep the servers on ambient air temperature. They would crap out right away due to both heat and humidity. I could also argue that even if my KWh price is low, due to my location, as compared to a cooler region, I should be given some type of credit. At the end this would be no different than living in a cooler region with a higher KW/h rate. There are just too many variables to consider if there were to be some type of credit plan for high energy costs and the spoofing probability also doesn’t help.

#18

Plan??? …uhhhh… to be honest the moment @0.018 per TFT from my point of view, price of electricity considered, it would be logical simply to buy TFT then invest into additional hardware for farming.

For example if 1.5k server get’s me 2.5k TFT/month 30k a year, if I use those funds to simply buy the token ill get 83.300TFT clean, without any electricity bills, service, monitoring etc… No contribution to the grid though.
It would be same as I were to farm with the hardware for 33 months, plus I would have to cover the electricity bill and everything else needed to stay operational.

#19

Plan is the energy saving feature WOL.
I haven’t gotten my new energy prices from January on, but it won’t be nice here in Germany.

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#20

i pay 750€ a month for my 51qm flat + 5 servers in idle… and i had luck with my energypreovider some others pay double my value
location Vienna :wink: