Knowledge baseFARMGOD features
Curtailment: mining that follows the price of power
Curtailment means slowing or stopping miners on purpose, when electricity is expensive or the grid needs the power. How FARMGOD does it automatically, by price, by schedule or by hashprice.
A miner earns the same whether electricity is cheap or expensive at that hour. Its costs do not stay the same. Curtailment is switching miners off, or down, on purpose for the hours in which running them loses money or the grid needs the power more.
Why farms curtail
- Price spikes. On a market with live prices, such as ERCOT in Texas, an hour can cost many times the average.
- Demand response. The grid operator pays large consumers for dropping load when the grid is tight.
- Peak charges. In some markets, the few highest-load hours of the year set next year's grid fees. In Texas this is known as 4CP.
- Thin margins. When the Bitcoin price or the hashprice falls, the least efficient machines stop paying for their power first.
What sets it off
In FARMGOD you choose one strategy per location:
- Manual: a switch you flip.
- Scheduled: fixed daily times for stopping and starting.
- Electricity price: a live grid price above your threshold. ERCOT's hubs and load zones are supported today.
- Bitcoin price or hashprice below your threshold.
Each price strategy has two thresholds, one to stop and a better one to start again. A price that hovers around a single line would otherwise switch the fleet on and off every few minutes.
Which miners it takes
- All machines of the location.
- By efficiency: only miners that run worse than a limit you set.
- Power cap: just enough miners, the least efficient first, to bring the site under a power target.
- Per model and firmware: each combination with its own thresholds and its own action, sleep or a low power mode. FARMGOD can work out each model's break-even and keep the thresholds up to date.
Safe to try
- Dry run. FARMGOD records what it would have done, without touching a miner.
- Staggered start. Miners come back in steps, so the site's electrics are not hit all at once.
- Every event on record: when, why, how many miners, and how many followed.
How to get it
Curtailment is part of Cloud PRO and of every Private VPS; a Private VPS adds a dashboard of its own for the events. Which miners can take part is listed on their pages, such as Antminer and Whatsminer. The Curtailment guide has every setting, with worked examples.
New to FARMGOD? Get started shows the three steps, and the pricing compares the plans.
