“Far too much energy”: what the debate gets right, and the question nobody asks

No objection comes up as reliably in corporate workshops as this one, and none is argued with wrong numbers as often, in both directions. So first the honest scale, then the three questions underneath it that actually make up the debate.

So “as much as an entire country” is true, but it sounds more dramatic than it is: tumble dryers, data centres and the gold industry also use “as much as a country”. The country comparison works for any sizeable industry. It just answers none of the questions that matter.

First question: where does the power come from?

A kilowatt hour is not a kilowatt hour. Power from a coal plant has a different footprint from power from a hydro dam whose surplus nobody else will take. And here more has changed in a few years than the public debate has registered: according to the 2025 Cambridge study, a good half of mining electricity now comes from sustainable sources, and the share of coal has collapsed from around 37 per cent in 2022 to under 9. Miners simply hunt the cheapest electricity on earth, and the cheapest electricity is increasingly the kind nobody else wants.

Second question: what does this consumer do to the grid?

Bitcoin miners are the most flexible large load a power grid can have: they switch off in seconds. No factory can do that. In Texas this is documented routine, miners take part in the grid operator's programmes and drop off the network during heatwaves and winter storms so the power flows to households instead. A grid with lots of wind and sun needs exactly this kind of consumer, because renewable generation fluctuates. California alone threw away around 3.4 terawatt hours of wind and solar power in 2024, curtailed because nobody needed it at the wrong moment. Mining is the only industrial consumer that travels to the power instead of bringing the power to itself.

Third question: what grows where the power used to go to waste?

This is the part of the story that stays with me most, because it is so rarely told. A small hydro plant in a remote village does not pay for itself while the residents run little more than a few lamps. A miner as the first anchor customer buys the surplus from day one, makes the plant viable, and steps back as local demand grows. In Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, several thousand households have reportedly been connected this way, at individual sites the price of electricity fell by up to 60 per cent, and the clinic and the workshop always take priority over the machines.

And now the question nobody asks

Which leaves the real question: is it worth it? Here it pays to pause for a moment. Nobody has ever calculated how much electricity streaming, online advertising or cash machines “deserve”. Nobody asks how much energy watching cat videos is allowed to burn. For everything else we accept that usefulness is subjective and that people vote on it with their demand. Only with Bitcoin do we ask the question, and that says more about our habits than about Bitcoin.

And what must be conceded? Three things. Absolute consumption grows with the price, that is the system's design, and the long-term curve points upwards, dampened by the halvings. Retired mining machines are specialised hardware, and the industry documents its recycling poorly so far, even if the famous e-waste estimates rest on contestable assumptions. And where miners operate inflexibly and under weak rules, local grids and neighbourhoods suffer, the noise of cooling fans is real. Texas is the showcase, not the norm. Anyone telling you there is nothing to this debate is selling you something, just like anyone turning it into a reckoning.

• Roughly 0.5 per cent of the world's electricity, more than gold, less than banks and data centres
• A good half from sustainable sources, and the share of coal has collapsed
• Miners stabilise grids because they can switch off in seconds
• Mining finances power infrastructure in places where nobody else invests
• The question “is it worth it?” is asked of no other consumer of electricity, and it is a question of values