Café Bitcoin | Day 7 of 50: Daniel Batten on Bitcoin and Energy, Britain's Curtailment Bill, and Wealth Is Energy - The Café Bitcoin Podcast

Cory was out for a family wedding, so Brady and Philip hosted from his handle. Also new: a weekly recap song in a different genre each week, covering everything from the previous weeks of the show.
Daniel Batten on Cambridge's new number. Its updated assessment puts Bitcoin mining at 59.4% clean energy, against a global grid mix near 40%. Hydro is the largest single source. Full report expected later this year.
Sweden's grid used Bitcoin mining 11,000 times last year to absorb excess wind. Batten's point: operators call it flexible load, flexible compute, or data centers. Anything but Bitcoin mining. Six Brazilian energy companies are doing the same with stranded generation.
The best idea in the episode, and it's Batten's. A grid operator is incentivized to admit a problem, because saying so unlocks resources and doesn't destabilize the grid. A central banker never can, because the admission is itself the instability.
Batten expects the West to adopt Bitcoin as an energy solution before a monetary one. In the global South the monetary problems are existential already: banking access, storing wealth safely, remittances that otherwise cost up to 20%.
The Ethiopian dam. You cannot build half a dam, so it's sized for demand 20 years out. No transmission lines, no industry, no customer for the surplus. Miners paid roughly three cents per kilowatt hour and delivered over $100M in unexpected revenue.
Callum Wheeler of Renew Blocks on Britain's curtailment bill. £1.5B last year paying wind farms to switch off and firing gas nearer London instead, forecast to reach £7B by 2030. A new "demand for constraints" market is meant to fix it.
A near-blackout on June 23 reached the shadow energy secretary via control-room whistleblowers. Cause: unexpected air conditioning demand in Britain's fourth heat wave. Wheeler's pilot is mining co-located inside a Scottish Highlands hydro powerhouse, built for £2M and never switched on.
Susie Violet Ward spent 13 months chasing a BBC correction on a headline claiming every Bitcoin payment uses a swimming pool of water. No correction, and the undisclosed source was a central banker. Brandolini's law: refuting costs ten times what inventing does.
Closing round on first resources. Inventing Bitcoin by Yan Pritzker, including his family's story of carrying value out of Russia. Also the Bullish Case, Broken Money, swan.com/welcome with Natalie Brunell, and Mary Kay Fain's approach: ask someone to recall a time they couldn't use their own money.

Café Bitcoin | Day 7 of 50: Daniel Batten on Bitcoin and Energy, Britain's Curtailment Bill, and Wealth Is Energy

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