NuEnergen's Kevin Hamilton on Miners as Grid Assets

Five days of extreme heat had just rolled across the United States when Kevin Hamilton stepped up to speak at Mining Disrupt Miami in June 2024. California, Arizona, New York and the Upper Midwest had all been through it. Hamilton, CEO of NuEnergen, an energy cost optimization company that works with miners in North America, wanted the room to know what that meant for them. "There is not another industry in the United States that has electric loads that are as dispatchable, curtailable as miners," he said.

When the heat climbs and the grid is stressed, mining load can be switched off, and that keeps the lights on for everyone else. He named who that protects: elderly and infirm people, and our own families. He asked miners to remember it the next time a policymaker says something unkind about the mining community. Then he got to the money.

Mine owners, he said, should now think of their mines as power plants. Make the site available for curtailment, and there are programs across the country that will pay for it: traditional demand response, capacity-based demand response, and wholesale energy markets where a miner, or a company like NuEnergen acting for it, bids its capacity on a day-ahead or real-time basis and is paid for not consuming electricity. The headline on his slide summed it up: monetizing your energy whether you use it or not. The second half of his advice started before a site is even running.

Get on the right tariff. If the site is in a deregulated market with a choice of supplier, have a rational electricity purchasing strategy, with a third-party provider or the local utility. And have a third party audit the power bills. "Trust me, there will be errors in those bills," he said, and electricity is among a miner's largest operating costs.

Put it all together, the right tariff, audited bills and every demand response program available, and Hamilton said an operator might shave more than a penny or so per kilowatt hour off the energy bill. For a mine, he called that very meaningful. He ended where he started, on the heatwave of the week before. There is a community benefit, he said, to bitcoin miners being available to curtail load when asked, to help avoid a blackout or a brownout.

When Hamilton gave that talk, bitcoin traded at sixty-one thousand, two hundred seventy-two dollars. On October 19, 2026 it was eighty-two thousand, four hundred thirty dollars. The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.