Bitcoin Miners as the Grid's Free Battery

A one-megawatt battery costs several million dollars. Brian Snyder, CEO of Kaboomracks, told an audience at Mining Disrupt Miami 2024 that a Bitcoin mine can do much of the same work for the power grid, and the grid does not have to pay for it. Snyder's starting point was supply. Nuclear and coal plants are closing, he said, and they are not being replaced with other baseload power.

Wind and solar are cheap once they are built, but they are variable. Turbines freeze in the cold. Solar only works while the sun is out. And new transmission lines take years and a great deal of capital.

Demand, meanwhile, is climbing. He cited a Dominion Energy forecast in which data centers grow to 10 to 16 percent of the utility's capacity, and he pointed to AI inference, the energy used every time people interact with a model, as a growing share of that load. His answer was the elastic load. A Bitcoin mine can absorb surplus power when renewables overproduce, and switch off when the grid needs that power back.

In his words, "it's a free battery for the grid that the grid doesn't have to pay for." He described what that looks like from the generator's side. On PJM, he said, there are hours when the power price goes negative. A coal plant cannot ramp down quickly. A mine can stop at once.

Then he gave an example from his own work. In 2018 he worked on a plan to convert a hundred-megawatt coal plant to biomass. The design kept 60 megawatts as baseload for the local community and attached a 40-megawatt Bitcoin mine, with capacity held back for demand response. The project never went ahead, but the numbers stood out.

Instead of a payback measured over 15 to 20 years, he said, it was looking at a matter of years, and with Bitcoin's later run probably about 18 months. He closed with advice for miners who own infrastructure. Many power agreements are old, he said, and utilities need rate schedules that reward flexible load. As AI and data centers compete for power, the relationship with the utility becomes the asset.

As he put it, "that access to the power is going to be worth a lot of money." When Snyder spoke, Bitcoin was at $61,272. Today it is $79,612. The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and more stories like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.