From hobbyists mining in their living room to hydropower plants in Africa and nuclear facilities in Pennsylvania — Bitcoin mining has become a global energy ecosystem. New hardware and software solutions continually expand the range of uses: heat, grid stabilization, development infrastructure, and much more. Most people see it as an energy problem. It’s exactly the opposite.
Mention Bitcoin mining at a dinner table, and most people still think of noisy containers full of blinking hardware wasting energy. That reaction is understandable — but it’s fundamentally wrong. Today, mining is a real player in energy infrastructure, the energy transition, and a budding global community of creative solutions. Let’s look at what’s already happening — and put it in a Danish context.
“Almost all the electricity that goes into a miner comes out as heat. That’s not waste — it’s a resource waiting to be used.”
Heat as a product, not waste
An ASIC miner is an electric heat producer. Almost all the electricity that goes in comes out as heat — it’s simple physics: energy changes form but doesn’t disappear. Traditionally, that heat has been treated as waste and blown out into the air. But if the heat is used for heating — for example, where water is heated via hydro-cooling — then you get not just satoshis but also heat as a by-product.
Several manufacturers make solutions for exactly this purpose — take, for example, MicroBT’s hydro-cooled Whatsminer M-series, which is designed to circulate water heated up to 70°C.¹ MicroBT’s strategic partner on heat recovery is HeatCore, which has developed a system that scales from a private home to centralized district heating. At the residential level, the HS20 system can supply homes of up to 200 m² with hot tap water. It can also provide hot water for swimming pools or whatever else you need heat for. At the commercial level, it covers office buildings and industries such as fish farming and much more that involve heat. At full scale, it can be integrated directly into district heating networks.² The products exist, have been tested, and are sold today.
In Denmark this is particularly interesting. We already have one of the world’s best-developed district heating infrastructures — 69% of Danes are supplied with district heating.³ It’s not about building something new, but about integrating a new heat source into something that already exists.
If, as a private individual or a business, you’d like an easy way to try out innovative heating solutions, there are companies like 21energy and Heatbit that offer exactly this. At enogtyve.org/discounts you’ll find links and discounts on their products.
Mining as development infrastructure
Gridless is a company that operates in Kenya, Malawi, and Zambia and uses power from stranded hydropower, geothermal energy, and biomass — resources that would otherwise go to waste because there isn’t enough local demand. Gridless steps in as a “buyer of last resort”,ᴬ buying the surplus power and sharing the bitcoin revenue with the energy partner — thereby helping to finance the expansion of the grid to new households and businesses. This is mining as development infrastructure: not as an energy consumer, but as the demand that makes rural electrification possible in the first place.
The same principle applies in a completely different context. In Texas, North Dakota, and other oil states, mining is done with flare gas — natural gas that arises as a by-product of oil drilling and would otherwise be flared off and emitted as CO₂ without producing anything at all. Bitcoin mining makes it attractive to capture and use this flare gas, where previously there was no economic incentive to do so.
The best-known example is Crusoe Energy, which pioneered “Digital Flare Mitigation”: a generator is installed on-site, converts the gas into electricity, and powers mining hardware directly at the well. Crusoe documents a reduction of up to 63% in CO₂ emissions compared to traditional flaring — and has installed over 425 facilities across seven states and two countries.⁴
The broader point: mining is an extremely flexible demand that is naturally attracted to cheap and surplus energy. This makes it a unique instrument for absorbing the energy no one else wants — and thus a genuine tool in the energy transition, not an obstacle to it.
“As an energy producer, you’ll always have a buyer in bitcoin mining — that’s a guarantee the energy market has never had before.”
Two points are inextricably linked. The first: mining is what keeps the Bitcoin network secure. Each miner spends real energy and computing power sealing transactions into the chain — and the more total hash rateᴮ the network has, the more expensive and unrealistic it becomes for an attacker to manipulate it. This isn’t a technical detail; it’s one of the essential foundations Bitcoin rests on.
The second: as an energy producer, you’ll always have a buyer in bitcoin mining. Energy can’t be stored cheaply, and if more is produced than is consumed, it’s usually lost and sometimes even a problem or a cost. Mining solves this — it can scale up and down in milliseconds and pays cash, regardless of time or geography. It gives energy producers something they’ve never had: a guaranteed buyer that steps aside for the next better bid.
Mining as a catalyst for clean energy expansion
Bitcoin mining can finance and enable investments in clean energy infrastructure that would otherwise never be built — because the miners, as a guaranteed base-load customer, contribute to the facility’s economics from day one, while local demand gradually grows into the capacity. The scenario below illustrates the point.
From diesel to hydropower
SCENARIO
A region is powered by expensive, polluting diesel generators. Locally, there’s a stream with the potential for a hydropower plant that could produce 1 MW. But local demand is only 200 kW — no investor will finance a facility that can only sell a fifth of its output.
Add bitcoin mining as a guaranteed buyer of the remaining 800 kW, and the math changes completely. The facility is profitable from day one. As more households and businesses are connected, the miners are gradually turned down and the power is directed there instead. The region has jumped straight from diesel to clean hydropower — not because demand was large enough, but because mining made the investment possible.
The same applies to nuclear power
Nuclear power plants are extremely expensive to build and have massive fixed operating costs regardless of output level — which means they effectively run at full capacity around the clock, and periods of low demand and low spot prices can directly threaten their economics. Bitcoin mining is the ideal partner as an always-on base-load customer. An early, concrete example is the Nautilus Cryptomine in Pennsylvania, where TeraWulf, in collaboration with Talen Energy, established a mining facility with a direct connection to the Susquehanna nuclear power plant.⁵ Since then, interest has exploded — and today both AI data centers and mining operators compete to become the preferred energy partners for nuclear plants that otherwise struggle with low-price periods.
The solo lottery, Heatpunks, and innovation
Another interesting development is the hobby mining scene, which increasingly centers on configuring miners and the popular Bitaxe mini-miners. People do it not only for the rare, almost miraculous experience of finding a block themselves, but because you learn a lot from setting them up hands-on and gain a better understanding of what’s happening and how it all fits together.
But something more is happening too. Across time zones, hobbyists share schematics, firmware patches, and ideas for heat integrations — people experimenting with heating garages, greenhouses, wilderness hot tubs, and breweries with their miners, or building custom hydro solutions in their home workshops. This is where new use cases are discovered before the industry has seen them. The community is itself an innovation engine.
The Heatpunks movement is an international expression of a group of enthusiasts interested in finding solutions and using the heat from mining in various ways. In the Danish Bitcoin community enogtyve.org, these possibilities and ideas have been shared frequently, and now we’re seeing more people start to pursue the opportunities in Bitcoin mining, heat reuse, and the benefits of building bitcoin mining into our energy infrastructure. Hubs like The Space in Denver — founded by Tyler Stevens and Wyatt O’Rourke — are another of the nodes in this ecosystem where knowledge moves between the hobbyist building their first Bitaxe, the developer experimenting with heat integrations, and the more serious operator optimizing an entire farm. Tyler is a thermal engineer, the author of Bitcoin Mining Heat Reuse, and the founder of Exergy, which designs heating systems powered by bitcoin mining. You can read more at heatpunks.org
Denmark is a natural test market
Curtailmentᶜ is often described as a future problem. In Denmark, it’s already the present. In 2024, 59% of Denmark’s electricity came from wind turbines.⁶ And 2024 set a record for negative electricity prices: in West Denmark there were 371 hours of negative spot prices — a 32% increase on the year before — and in East Denmark 275 hours.⁷ That’s the equivalent of more than 14 full days in West Denmark alone, where power producers paid to offload electricity.
Imagine a fleet of miners that activate during exactly those hours — they absorb the surplus production and pay for it, and the heat can even be used for district heating. Instead of the energy being exported at a loss or becoming a direct cost, it’s converted into both bitcoin and heat.
Combined with our district heating infrastructure — 69% of Danish households connected to district heating³ — Denmark is a natural test market for the next generation of mining as heat and energy infrastructure. MicroBT’s M-series and the HeatCore system aren’t a distant dream in a Danish context. The hardware exists and is sold today — what’s missing is for someone to take the first step and get it out into a real, practical test in Denmark.
In the Danish Bitcoin community at enogtyve.org and our Telegram group, we’ve done a lot to plant seeds, spread knowledge, and raise awareness of exactly these possibilities — and it has provided fertile ground for budding initiatives, where more people are now actively exploring and working to promote awareness of the opportunities in energy and mining in a Danish context.
Curtailment, grid stabilization, and AI as a control layer
Grid stabilization is the other side of the curtailment coin. Electricity grids require constant balance, and even small fluctuations can destabilize the entire system. A fleet of miners that can be adjusted up and down almost instantly is, in effect, flexible load balancing — one of the most responsive forms of demand-side flexibilityᴰ we have.
AI makes the whole use case even more interesting. With access to real-time data on spot prices, frequency deviations, weather forecasts, and consumption patterns, we can — with the help of AI tools — begin to coordinate these decisions automatically across hundreds of sites and markets — transforming mining from a passive consumer into an active, intelligent element in the energy infrastructure.
AI doesn’t just improve existing systems — it can invent and optimize the next generations of control tools. Each advance creates the foundation for the next, faster than the one before. What we see today is probably the slowest pace at which AI will ever improve these systems.
Mining as grid balancing, curtailment management, frequency stabilization, heat source, and development infrastructure — all at once. This isn’t wasted energy. It’s infrastructure in the most literal sense of the word.
Knowledge of these possibilities exists — but it doesn’t always reach those who make the decisions. A growing group of people is working to change that. If you’re curious, join the conversation: chat.enogtyve.org
Sources
- Hashrate Index, 2024 — A Deep Dive into the HeatCore HS20 Hydro Mining System and Whatsminer M63S — hashrateindex.com
- MicroBT & HeatCore — HS20 hydro cooling suite — heatcore.tech
- Dansk Fjernvarme, 2025 — 69% of Danes are supplied with district heating; nearly 2 million homes connected
- Crusoe Energy / NYDIG, 2025 — Digital Flare Mitigation, 425+ facilities, 2.7 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalents mitigated
- TeraWulf / Talen Energy — Nautilus Cryptomine, Susquehanna Nuclear Power Plant, Pennsylvania
- Danish Energy Agency / Statistics Denmark, 2024 — 59% of Danish electricity production from wind turbines
- NRGi / Green Power Denmark, 2025 — 371 hours of negative electricity prices in DK1, 275 hours in DK2 in 2024 (record)
Glossary
ᴬ Buyer of last resort — a buyer that is always willing to take a product others don’t want, thereby ensuring that production never goes to waste.
ᴮ Hash rate — the total computing power used to secure the Bitcoin network; the higher the hash rate, the more resistant the network is to attack.
ᶜ Curtailment — when energy producers are forced to shut down production because the grid can’t absorb all the electricity being produced — typically during periods of high wind or solar production and low demand.
ᴰ Demand-side flexibility — the ability to adjust electricity consumption in real time based on the grid’s needs, as opposed to regulating on the production side.