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Featured on The Farmers Journal
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Mining Bitcoin on Top of an AD Plant
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Featured on The Farmers Journal • Mining Bitcoin on Top of an AD Plant •
Stranded renewables creates unique opportunity
In 2019, Ireland’s dispatch-down energy from wind resources was 711 GWh. This stranded energy is equivalent to 6.9% of Ireland's total available wind energy. This figure is an overall increase of about 254 GWh in dispatch-down energy from wind generation compared to 2018. Lost wind energy rose to 11.4% of total available wind energy in 2020, the equivalent of 1,448 GWh of electricity.Wind farms lost €75.5m worth of revenue in 2019 - up from €49.7m in 2018 - because they were forced by the grid operator to either switch off completely or turn down their power output to the national grid at certain times.Agriculture is responsible for 37 per cent of Irish emissions, according to the latest Environmental Protection Agency data, while 80 per cent of emissions from farming are related to methane.In recent years significant capital works have been undertaken to upgrade the transmission system to allow the exportation of more wind generation from wind farms, particularly in the North-West and South-West regions of Ireland. However, the Irish grid still struggles to optimise and transmit the energy produced by our vast array of renewable energy sources.The Process
Energy
The rapid expansion in the renewable sector and falling capital costs of such expansion has made the conversion of energy from one form to another simple. However, the harnessing and transmission of this energy is where inefficiencies arise.
Computing
Bitcoin mining monetises energy at source using using Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), which are specialised computers designed to compute hashes as quickly as possible..All the ASIC in the world are producing hashrate (firing computational guesses) with the aim of solving a block every 10 minutes.
Conversion
Bitcoin operates in a 24/7 highly liquid market. Bitcoin can be sold on the open market offering instant return on stranded or abundant energy that would have otherwise been wasted. “We cannot achieve our 2030 targets with today’s electricity system. There are already wind farms in the west of Ireland which are ready to go but are stalled because the transmission system is not strong enough to get power from where it is generated to where it is needed."— IWEA chief executive David Connolly
“Bitcoin mining is an anti-battery. It is a mechanism by which energy sources' economic potential can be instantly unleashed into the digital, rather than physically transmitted in the form of electrical energy or stored locally as chemical energy. Bitcoin mining is advantageous when utilised as a liquidity provider for energy sources considered stranded, under-utilised, or underdeveloped. As the Bitcoin mining industry continues to mature, the incentives exist to develop energy sources and conversion technologies that yield higher conversion efficiencies and lower costs per unit of energy time (measured in dollars per megawatt hour or $/MWh). Inevitably, this will lead to the development and conversion of all economically feasible energy flows into Bitcoin as monetary energy.Bitcoin mining is Nakamoto's Motor.”— Austin Storms