Bitcoin Is Heating Up: Bitcoin Mining Will Heat Up Europe
Maximilian Obvexer has a problem.
He heated his home in Austria with traditional heating oil, which was a financial burden. As a jack of all trades and a former engineer who worked in hydroelectric power plants, he was looking for a more economical way to heat his home.
After much experimentation and deep study of the world of Bitcoin mining, three years ago he founded a company that focused on this direction. His company, 21energy, produces balanced, reliable, and amazingly aesthetic (and surprisingly quiet!) devices for home mining. The first models of Ofen 1 provided a performance of up to 10 TH/s, while the high-end version could reach 40 TH/s at maximum power, but with significant noise. Expanding production, he hired 12 new employees just this year and released a new model Ofen 2 (35-42 TH/s), which looks like a regular heat sink that runs on Bitcoin. And yes, you can mine Bitcoin with this heat sink alone… or connect to any pool you like.
“Bitcoin heaters are a decentralized grid balancing system – right in your home!” he told hundreds of interested spectators on stage in Helsinki on Friday at the first Nordic Bitcoin conference, BTCHel. Notably, he spent most of his talk not selling his great products or telling his story of how he got into Bitcoin, but addressing the many challenges facing European power grids.
Europeans are forced to import electricity from abroad. Current power producers – coal, gas and hydroelectric power plants – are increasingly being told to turn off their power supply in favour of growing numbers of wind turbines and solar panels. Fossil fuel power plants emit CO2 and pollute the environment, while the proposed alternatives encourage the redirection of dynamic and uncontrollable generation into the grid. During peak periods, even renewable energy suppliers are forced to reduce or suspend production, as there is simply nowhere to put the excess energy.
This is certainly bad because it means potential energy that could have been used is lost, but what’s worse is that it makes the investment case for investors in renewable energy worse. Not least because households in Europe pay exorbitant prices for electricity… and heating in general is also quite expensive.
Taken together, it seems as if the entire old continent is getting into Bitcoin mining. Obvexer agrees: “It’s obvious, even if you don’t like or understand Bitcoin,” he tells me, standing next to his shiny green booth and the radiators that create a real warm atmosphere in the Helsinki showroom.
Indeed, a significant portion of his customer base are “sunshine guys” — climate change advocates who want to do something about reducing their consumption of fossil fuels. While they’re not the group that first comes to mind when it comes to Bitcoin, “the economics just make sense,” Obvexer says.
In a recent podcast interview with Knut Svanholm and Luc de Wolf, two of the co-organizers of BTCHel, Obvexer mentioned that “Finland is really at the forefront of Bitcoin heating and Bitcoin-based district heating”:
“Europe desperately needs Bitcoin mining given the high volatility in the power grid… we shouldn't be afraid of politicians because… they've already written it down – they just don't realize they wrote 'Bitcoin mining everywhere'.”
On stage in Helsinki, he displayed one of the most significant graphs in discussions about economics and energy, which clearly shows how important energy is for the well-being and prosperity of a society. “If you want a clean, rich and healthy society, you need a lot of energy.”
via: Todd Moss, “Eat More Electrons”
The next step for Obvexer and his team at 21energy is to implement flexible load sharing at the network level. Using mobile miners in a truck and reducing the load on production facilities such as hydroelectric power plants is an ideal solution for Bitcoin mining: instead of reducing the load due to grid congestion, they can redirect the electricity generated by water flows to the Bitcoin miners, which also reduces their response time from minutes to seconds.
Meet 21energy next week at #BTCHEL – the first large scale Bitcoin conference in the Nordic countries
Source: cryptonews.net
