The severe winter weather sweeping across the US has handed an unexpected windfall to well-prepared Bitcoin miners.
Instead of using energy for mining, they’re selling that surplus power back to stressed power grids, making far more money than they would mining Bitcoin.
“The grid may ask for that energy and the mining may turn off, but that means the grid is paying more for the energy than the miner is making by mining Bitcoin,” Scott Norris, chief mining officer at tokenised Bitcoin hashpower company Omnes, told DL News.
Norris explained the maths. A miner earning 8 cents per kilowatt-hour from mining could get paid 20 cents by the grid during peak demand. If their energy costs are only 4 cents, that’s a massive profit margin just for turning mining machines off.
“This I believe is all around a positive for the miner no matter the scenario,” Norris said.
Bitcoin mining stocks rallied on the opportunity. TeraWulf shares rose 15% and Iren jumped 18% over the past five days, according to Yahoo Finance.
Despite critics lambasting Bitcoin mining’s energy footprint, the current dynamics at play expose a counterintuitive reality about the industry.
Rather than being a drain on power grids, large-scale mining operations can actually stabilise them. By acting as flexible loads that can instantly turn off during peak demand, miners provide utilities with a safety valve when the grid is stressed.
Network impact
As Bitcoin miners turned off their machines due to the winter storm, the network’s hashrate plunged to 663 exahashes per second on Sunday.
That’s a seven-month low and 40% drop in two days.
Major miners had to drastically reduce their production.
CleanSpark’s daily Bitcoin output fell to 12 BTC from 22 BTC. Riot Platforms dropped to 3 Bitcoin from 16 BTC. Marathon Digital plummeted to 7 Bitcoin from 45 Bitcoin, while Iren fell from 18 BTC to 6 BTC, according to CryptoQuant data.
For miners who stayed online, however, conditions improved dramatically.
Lower hashrate means less competition for mining blocks. The Bitcoin hashprice index — which tracks mining profitability — rose to $0.04 per terahash daily from $0.038, according to HashrateIndex.
Who wins
Companies positioned to capitalise share common traits, Norris said.
They own their power plants and have deals with utilities that pay them to shut down when the grid needs power. The smartest operators also locked in guaranteed prices for their mining output ahead of time, protecting themselves if Bitcoin mining becomes less profitable.
Notably, the best positioned miners are also diversifying into AI and high-performance computing, Norris, explained, giving them multiple revenue streams beyond just Bitcoin.
Inclement weather or not, there’s still margin before concerns start settling in.
“If [Bitcoin investors] investors see a 60% or 80% drop then the integrity of the network might become a concern,” Norris said. “Bitcoin mining company investors should see it as a positive as they will have more BTC yields as difficulty drops.”
