Public bitcoin mining companies in their current iteration are frustrating, with an exception of a couple, and I'm tired of making excuses for them.
  • Their debt strategies suck
  • Their BTC treasuries are volatile, have never consistently increased over the longterm, and with the distribution cycle and competition, there's no reason to believe they ever will
  • They flirt with insolvency every bear market
  • They're oblivious to how far it would go if they paid a simple dividend in BTC even if it's just few inconsequential sats
  • They put perpetual sell pressure on BTC
  • They love nothing more than diluting the shit out of shareholders, a quarterly experience when debt is cheap, which would be fine if the money was used with wise eyes to the future
  • Actually they do love something more: losing money
  • They virtue signal the Lightning Network
Their fiat game goes like this: collateralize coin, borrow fiat, buy mining rigs, dilute shareholders, blow-up, repeat in no particular order. Sometimes looking over these company's 10-K reports I feel like I'm seeing what the lion, scarecrow, and tin-man saw.
My initial feeling is that Blackrock et al's foray into institutional ownership of mining stocks is because they want miners to eventually become AP's (Authorized Participants) in the ETF's creation-issuance-redemption cycle. No guarantee this works and I'm just speculating. Also, they perhaps see advantages when the dozen or so publicly listed miners eventually consolidate in a great reorg of the space, because of my grievances listed above, and because they might get themselves specially taxed (from their own stupidity), and because of the actual topic of this post, which is energy storage, something that can encroach on their unique energy market positioning.
Disclosure: I trade some of the miners via derivatives. I don't invest in them. I'm only invested in chemicals and bitcoin, and see no reason to invest in anything else unless it's a business I own or am building. But hey, that's just me.
So in a tl;dr refresher, here's the elephant in the room regarding renewable energy sourced from the wind and sun:
Intermittence—the wind and sun are not consistent. Thusly, even when wind and solar setups produce enough energy to provide an area's gross wattage every 24, there's no way to distribute it as grid circumstances demand, with its peaks and valleys, while maintaining the 60Hz heartbeat. This is why baseload energy expenditure is necessary to balance the grid, and maintain the heartbeat; this means natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, commercial geothermal, or a mix. Grids have a simple mandate: reliability and uptime. So what happens to all the excess renewable energy produced off-peak? It gets wasted.
Bitcoin miners can step in and absorb this excess. It makes them unique. They can power on and off their entire facility in just minutes, which makes them well-suited for demand response as well. But guess what else can occupy this space? Energy storage. It's nascent, but there's a great power building behind it. Trying to find the common denominator of both, and distilling them into a single phrase, I thought up this:

Increase the financial and environmental value of energy assets.

I wonder then if this is where energy and bitcoin really start merging. They're complementary, and it opens the door for mining into the subsidy game. Yes, bitcoin mining is about providing network security (I would argue it's more about transaction finality), but we're not talking about mining with your laptop's CPU stealing university dorm Kw's. We're talking about ASIC farms and publicly listed commercial facilities with industrial connections to energy grids that will need to find a way to incentivize renewable energy assets and provide returns. Renewable energy is already the cheapest form of energy per kWh. That's great for the first half of bitcoin mining's current economy of scale:
  • cheap electricity
  • access to capital
Renewable energy is also the fastest expanding type of energy. But in the fiat world, it's not the most profitable type of energy. That's probably confusing and doesn't make sense, so the best way I can think of explaining that statement of fossil fuels being the most profitable type of energy in the fiat world is the Industrial Revolution:
We went from water power to steam power by way of coal. Water power however, was cheaper than coal. So trusting liberal economists, water should’ve dominated industrial production energy inputs, and coal should’ve been limited to its specialization: transportation (trains, boats, etc).
But that’s not what happened.
Coal was better for exploiting human labor, so it was more profitable than water. Water was geography dependent, so you had to bring the people to the water. If those people strike or organize, you won’t find replacements. Fossil fuels could be brought into population centers, where impoverished people and immigrants, cut-off from any community managed farms where they might have skills, were easily exploitable. And as long as you keep shoveling coal, you can work people 24/7. Then you might even pay them in company scrip which is spendable at store networks they own. The limitation is only the amount of people and amount of coal you have. Water is hard to collect and privatize. Coal was not, and although more expensive, coal was an excellent source of surplus value. Fast forward to today, and that's microcosmic of the fiat world bitcoiners sometimes rail against even if they don't know it, with its literal hardened connection to fossil fuels via the petrodollar. You see renewable energy is difficult to monopolize and control. It’s too decentralized and cheap. The sun and wind are everywhere. It’s in bitcoin mining’s wheelhouse, and as an aside, it's another reason I don’t like proof-of-stake, because:
  • Energy: distributed
  • Capital: concentrated
A bitcoin world introduces a disinflationary base layer, different incentives, fixed monetary principles, fixed liberties, and is a referendum on unfettered growth, imagining it more as unfettered development.
Replacing this system is daunting, and I posit that breaking fossil fuel dependence is necessary for a true bitcoin standard. That said, fossil fuels will be needed for quite awhile, and we shouldn't upend an entire energy economy for technologies that are not yet mature. That would be silly. And on the other side, we shouldn't conflate the whole of renewable energy based on its visibly failed actors, like confused bitcoin critics do calling it crypto and referencing LUNA, FTX, and Celsius.
Renewable deployments are surging out from under the pandemic-related delays and supply-chain woes. The prices are collapsing too, so much so that they're actually hurting.
Back to energy storage. It's coming commercially, even if innovation is taking longer than you have patience. It'll be a mix, and the design pattern of storing/exploiting excess off-peak renewable energy is somewhat established:
  • chemical batteries
  • gravity batteries
  • green hydrogen via electrolysis
The expenditure of resources (from human IQ to government subsidies) in these domains is enormous, and beginning to yield awesome results. Solid-state lithium was sci-fi just 4 years ago. Now we're inching closer to commercial versions. Every month there's headlines of a new major lithium mine discovery. And too, we're seeing a rapid buildout of commercial lithium recycling facilities all over the world which were heretofore a missing piece of the puzzle. AES Corp has broken ground in Texas on their $4B green hydrogen production facility which will be the largest in America. Saudi Arabia is building the largest green hydrogen facility in the world as part of the NOEM project. Ethiopia's GERD hydro dam will provide 80% of the country's electricity and lift half the population out of poverty. Energy Vault is just weeks from completing their 100MW gravity battery storage in China, and their modular 35MW gravity battery facility in Texas. I'm watching the latter very closely, because if it meets its endpoints, especially getting over 80% efficiency, it could proffer another tool for commercial energy storage that's cheaper and more durable than lithium without any of the messy environmental backend (which admittedly is getting incrementally better). It's just good to see we're finally at the point of put up, or shut up with these. Here's a short video on how the Texas battery works.
There are many different kinds of gravity batteries. The simplicity is attractive in an Occam's razor way, and the tech is nothing new, but besides pumped-hydro and clocks, they've never served a purpose until now thanks to the renewable conundrum. You see this dusting-off happen with old computer science solutions sometimes, which is another reason research and building is important, even if it doesn't yield an IPO or get strangers to sleep with you. Fiat minded Lambo shit.
Maybe there's arguments that subsidies are part of the fiat game regarding green energy. Subsidies built the fiat energy system. Eventually fiat had to rug the gold commodity to form a connection with the energy commodities. The petrodollar system went suddenly after a short period of volatility during the transition. It worked for over 50 years with no significant loss in Treasury demand. Unfettered growth. Any expansion in energy was necessarily an expansion of the USD. It was able to control the negative effects of its monetary expansion quite well this way. But no debt cycle is infinite. Time to subsidize a different commodity and build a new system. This is a very unique commodity. Oil gets rugged first. Then the rest. Embrace just a little bit of Dark Maximalism.
Anyway, post over. Not sure I agree with everything I said, and it was a mess, but I like using Stacker to help clarify my own thoughts. Sats for criticism. Lot's of sats for high-rez criticism. You know the rules.
"Renewable energy is already the cheapest form of energy per kWh"
Press X to doubt.
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Well if the WEF forum tells me it's true it must be 😂🤣🤡
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The WEF link was a big red flag for me too.
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Facts don't care about your feelings.
The good thing about numbers is that numbers don't lie.
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Are you saying that the WEF only presents facts?
Numbers themselves definitely don't lie but people publish false data all the time. That's why bitcoin is such an important advancement for humanity. Bitcoin can't lie. It can only relay truth.
The WEF is the enemy of the free world and the single greatest threat to humanity.
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Jon, that wasn't the WEF's own study, they were referencing an IREA study. And there isn't much that's controversial about it. Since that study, renewable prices have fallen even further, while significantly more renewable capacity has been added globally. And the WEF isn't a the greatest threat to humanity. C'mon now.
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There's no real way to know what the real market price of solar is because prices are so distorted by government intervention via tax credits, subsidies, etc.
C'mon now. The WEF is behind the great reset: https://www.weforum.org/focus/the-great-reset. They want to undermine every government in the world and are most definitely the single greatest threat to humanity and what little freedom still exists in the world.
International Renewable Energy Agency or IRENA
Yes, and the numbers say you are 1 retarded person. PROOF! FUCKING TECH ILLITERATE WORTHLESS PIECE OF SHIT, YOU ARE WORSE THAN MANY FIAT PEOPLE.
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WEF lies and doesn’t care about you
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Yes correct, and that report was from 2020 data. They're even cheaper now.
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  • Wind $46 MWh
  • Solar $45 MWh
  • Coal $74 MWh
  • Natgas $81 MWh
It's not close and nobody knows where the bottom is. My own solar setup w/ battery was quoted at paying for itself in 7 years. I did it in just over 3. That's not at scale, but consider it works differently than that, because my home is no longer drawing energy from the grid, and is actually sending its excess energy into the grid. On top of this I'm self-sufficient.
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Where is nuclear on this list?
Also, do these prices take into account government subsidies on renewables?
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I'd love to see the price of each form of energy compared once you take all the subsidies out. Oil, gas, and coal are also massively subsidized and have been for decades.
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Oil and gas and coal is also under invested due to the political climate over the last 20 years+more. So even if they aren't significantly hampered with tax, ban and regulation, the industries aren't performing optimally and the supply chain is kind of breaking down for them which drives up cost.
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These people pull numbers out of their ass. They are tech illiterates who don't know the basics of electricity or why solar is absolute trash due to phase shift, among other things.
Be compassionate though, these people are simply mentally ill zombies that have been taken over by fiat. They do not have cognitive agency like you or I.
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I use solar panels and batteries. Trash was being reliant on a centralized grid to grant me electricity privileges with a monthly KYC bill that varied wildly based on the behavior of rich men north of Richmond. Now they send me a check. The setup paid for itself in just over 3 years, not the 7 years I was quoted. Decentralized energy. Decentralized money. Now I just need some decentralized food production and mesh network for internet access.
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Yeah, I am trying to find any objective data on any electricity generation but all the established sources are biased and bought by lobbyists and interest groups.
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The cost of solar energy has dropped dramatically in recent years and is now competitive with or cheaper than fossil fuels in many parts of the world:
  • Solar energy costs average between 3-6 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) and are trending downward[3].
  • Global coal prices have historically averaged 6 cents/kWh. Fossil fuel steam averages around 5 cents/kWh, and small-scale natural gas can be as low as 3 cents/kWh[2].
  • In 2016, a major commercial solar installation bid an extremely low price of 2.9 cents/kWh, effectively leveling the playing field with fossil fuels' cheapest offerings[2].
  • Without subsidies, solar is likely the cheapest energy source in the world, as demonstrated by record low power purchase agreements in countries like the UAE and Chile[2].
  • The upfront costs of solar systems have dropped significantly, with the average cost ranging from $2.40 to $3.60 per watt installed[1].
However, fossil fuels still have the advantage of being a reliable, consistent source of energy. Solar's intermittent nature requires energy storage or baseload power from other sources to maintain grid reliability[1].
Overall, the cost comparison between solar and fossil fuels is complex, with factors like subsidies, environmental impacts, and reliability playing a role. But the rapidly falling costs of solar make it an increasingly attractive and cost-competitive option in many situations.
Sources [1] Fossil Fuels are Fiat Energy. Reorg of the mining space coming ⚒️ \ stacker news ~bitcoin #254491 [2] Solar Energy vs Fossil Fuels: How Do They Compare? | EnergySage https://www.energysage.com/about-clean-energy/solar/solar-energy-vs-fossil-fuels/ [3] Solar Energy vs. Fossil Fuels: The Great Debate https://www.bluesel.com/blog/solar-energy-vs-fossil-fuels-the-great-debate/ [4] Renewables vs Fossil Fuel Cost Comparisons, without Subsidies https://sustainability.stackexchange.com/questions/10641/renewables-vs-fossil-fuel-cost-comparisons-without-subsidies [5] Is Solar Really Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels? - Smart Cities Dive https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/solar-really-cheaper-fossil-fuels/1106159/
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Intermittent and unreliable power sources requiring massive government subsidies paired with expensive and environmentally devastating energy storage systems are the cheapest form of energy per kWh, brought to you by Pfizer
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Why do you think bitcoin hashpower keeps setting global records even when the BTC price has collapsed 70% from its peak?
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Oh maybe I misunderstood. If you are saying that solar and wind are the cheapest per kWh from a bitcoin miners perspective, that is probably true.
But in that case, it's only because of malinvestment as a result of subsidies and cost benefit analyses that obscure the trade-offs being made in terms of reliability and other factors. I do agree that this trend is likely to continue in the short-medium term.
But I would just argue that this malinvestment is the fiat trend, not fossil fuels.
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I'd suggest looking over the storied history of fossil fuel subsidies @anon, then consider its many wars requiring its own subsidy set, add up all its ecological disasters from spills, explosions, contaminations, smog, and leaks, then check out the global geographical footprint of it wells, mines and fields, then take inventory of the infrastructure needed to support it from tankers, refineries, pipelines, platforms, and consider everything that goes into manually getting gasoline to your gas station. This is to say nothing of the small group controlling most of it all. Standard Oil was once BP, Amoco, Exxon, and Chevron, before the anti-trust case. They also controlled all the logistics infrastructure. Anti-trust never happened in the Middle-East, in Russia, and elsewhere. Bitcoin and green energy are coming for these dinosaurs.
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Because of the reasons you listed :) they fund their growth with debt thinking btc will go up forever. It's the same reason microstrategy bought btc with debt. They think btc will go up forever and they can't lose.
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We are at the mainstream leftist phase of StackerNews adoption, with all the retards who believe government propaganda and don't know what EROI is.
This idiot didn't even realize mining has a high fixed expense so it can't be run a small fraction of the day. More solar demand leads to more gas peaker plants that are less efficient.
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Lot more to commercial mining than just that. Go ask the big swinging dick CORZ how they found themselves in bankruptcy court.
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Fuck off retard, wasn't talking to you
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For what it's worth your comment is inappropriate. But you probably feel entitled to such comments or something
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You know what's inappropriate? The damage you cause to the world by being wrong, which is particularly insidious when bitcoin is not big enough to stop and PUNISH YOUR FOOLISHNESS ECONOMICALLY!!!
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I need to read this way more closely, but can I make a meta-comment and say how great it is to encounter something super substantive and well-articulated like this here? Man, this is glorious. More later.
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Miners can make arrangements with utilities who have miss-allocated capital to the illogical, unreliable power source of wind and solar.
But miners should not and cannot plan to not operate based on the unreliability of these energy sources or you will drive your mining operation into the ground. Miners must plan to run near 100% of the time to ROI on their machines and thus they need reliable power sources such as fossil fuels and Nuclear.
So, while indirectly miners can help the miss-allocated capital, long term miners ensure the build out of reliable sources of power and de risk the scaled build out of these energy sources. This is great for humanity and human flourishing.
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Then they'll go bankrupt, from either difficult energy contracts with bad curtailment guarantees, or by putting their faith in commodity prices they can't control, or hoping the political establishment doesn't give their competition subsidies, or having to shut down because of BTC's price volatility to the downside, which isn't something those with renewable infrastructure need to do because they'll make even more money as their competition idles. Miners already have access to reliable baseload sources and it's not enough to make money. Take CORZ which was the largest miner by hashpower in America that filed chapter 11 last year. I'd argue the records bitcoin is setting with network hashpower is in large part due to the illogical and unreliable sources you mentioned. Because those grids with big flexload are where hashpower is growing fastest globally. Even El Salvador's new 1.3 EH/s mining operation buildout is powered exclusively by a $1B renewable energy park.
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Like your thinking 👍
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This is a really thoughtful post! I am curious about this line:
"We're talking about ASIC farms and publicly listed commercial facilities with industrial connections to energy grids that will need to find a way to incentivize renewable energy assets and provide returns."
From your perspective, why will pubco's need to find ways to incentivize renewable assets? Why not incentivize the build-out of more reliable (in terms of baseload) generation sources?
Would also be interested to hear your perspective on whether or not you see Nuclear as "renewable".
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Nuclear is renewable but it's exceedingly expensive, exceedingly centralized, will always carry security risks, disposal risks, require lots of labor from guards to operators. I'm no fan. I feel it's mostly a Twitter thing at this point. Even if you take a small SMR reactor, these produce 300MW, take 2 years to fabricate, and probably another 3 years to install after various community lawsuits to keep it away. Oh and the GE version costs $9.3B to build...up from $5.3B a few years ago. $9.3B for 300MW? You could have 300MW of wind and 300MW of solar and battery storage for under $1B built in less than half the time.
Pubco's are going to incentivize the build-out of reliable baseload generation, it's just that the baseload will be energy storage downloaded from renewable energy, not fossil fuel baseload. The input costs of fossil fuels will not be competitive with renewable energy, not even energy storage that discharges only 80% of what it downloads from the renewable assets. We're kind of only scratching the surface of what we can extract with solar materials, are seeing big improvements in geothermal, and great competition with wind designs. Don't expect any to get less efficient.
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thank you!
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Wind and solar has disposal issues but nobody talks about it.
And nuclear disposal issue is not a big deal anyway. Spent fuel can be stored on site, safely, it takes up little space, and eventually when the plant is retired the spent fuel can be consolidated with a common storage area. By the way spent nuclear fuel is mostly dangerous for the first 5 years or so. Gamma radioactivity drops fast. But what do you do with the vast amount of mercury and other waste from solar? That stuff is permanent. They are also resorting to burying wind turbine blades they have grave yards for them and they are not bio degradable +more
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Tl;Dr spent nuclear fuel "recycles" itself within 5 years due to radioactive decay. But due to an abundance of caution it is stored for much longer.
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Spentnuclear fuel can also be reprocessed because it contains valuable isotopes and what not. But that is a different story
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this is actually my main concern with wind and solar - well, that and the manufacturing/transportation issues. i don't feel that it is intellectually honest to say that wind/solar have such a better emissions profile (or whatever metric) when the considerations of how the systems are built (inputs-wise) are very often absent from the conversation...
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Awesome post! Thanks for this. I predict as Bitcoin infrastructure grows. There will be more technology and new resources discovered out there while being more efficiently and wise using them.
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Really cool to see how those gravity batteries work! I always thought chemical-based batteries were a pretty stupid idea for grid storage, given you can just use the simple laws of physics to store your energy, rather than mining a shitload of lithium and dealing with all the fallout that entails.
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This is a great post man. Feels like nations should all mine bitcoin when there is a surplus of energy. Storage <-> Minig BTC seems like a great choice to make depending on the weather. In The Netherland people with solar panels actually have to pay money if they collect more energy than they have to use for themselves, because the grid is TOO FULL. Can you believe it?
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Nuclear is probably a more reasonable bet on cheapest energy. Nuclear and fossils have this huge edge that they are reliable and you can control when they produce energy, wind is dependent on weather, and solar is only available in the day.
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Highlight:
The article discusses the potential for renewable energy and energy storage technologies to complement and support the growth of Bitcoin. Key points:
  • Renewable energy deployments are surging, with new developments in battery storage, green hydrogen, and gravity-based storage systems like Energy Vault's projects.[1]
  • However, the intermittent nature of wind and solar power means they require baseload energy sources like natural gas, coal, or nuclear to maintain grid reliability.[1]
  • Bitcoin mining can help absorb excess renewable energy produced off-peak, and its ability to rapidly power on and off makes it well-suited for demand response.[1]
  • Energy storage technologies can also help increase the financial and environmental value of renewable energy assets by reducing waste of excess generation.[1]
  • The article suggests that the intersection of renewable energy, energy storage, and Bitcoin mining could be an important area of development, as it allows mining to participate in energy market subsidies and incentives.[1]
Sources [1] Fossil Fuels are Fiat Energy. Reorg of the mining space coming ⚒️ \ stacker news ~bitcoin #254491
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