For two centuries, factories chased cheap hands and dense ports. Today, miners roll into windy plateaus and hydro spillways, asking a simpler question: where are the cheapest wasted watts?
When computing can move to energy rather than energy to people, the map tilts.
Heavy industry has always chased cheap energy, but it still needed bodies and ships. The novelty with Bitcoin (BTC) is how completely labor, logistics, and physical product have dropped out of the siting equation.
A mining plant can be one warehouse, a dozen staff, a stack of ASICs, and a fiber line. Its output is pure block rewards, not a bulky commodity that must be shipped. That lets miners plug into genuinely stranded or curtailed energy that no conventional factory would bother to reach, and to rush when policy or prices change.
Bitcoin isn’t the first energy-seeking industry, but it is the first large industry whose primary location bid is “give me your cheapest wasted megawatt, and I’ll show up,” with labor nearly irrelevant.
Curtailment creates a new subsidy
CAISO curtailed about 3.4 TWh of utility-scale solar and wind in 2023, up roughly 30% from 2022, and saw more than 2.4 TWh curtailed in just the first half of 2024 as mid-day generation routinely overshot demand and transmission limits.
Nodal prices often go negative: generators pay the grid to take their electricity because shutting down is costly, and they still want renewable tax credits.
Miners show up as a strange new bidder. Soluna builds modular data centers at wind and solar projects that soak up power the grid cannot absorb. In Texas, Riot earned about $71 million in power credits in 2023 by curtailing during peak demand, often more than offsetting the BTC they would have mined.
In 2024, the Bitcoin mining firm turned curtailment into tens of millions of dollars of credits, and in 2025, it is on track to beat that, with more than $46 million of credits booked in the first three quarters alone.
A 2023 paper in Resource and Energy Economics models Bitcoin demand in ERCOT and finds that miners can increase renewable capacity but also emissions, with much of the downside mitigated if miners operate as demand-response resources.
Curtailment and negative pricing are a de facto subsidy for anyone who can show up exactly where and when power is cheapest, and mining is architected to do that.
Hash rate moves faster than factories
Miners used to seasonally migrate within China seasonally, chasing cheap wet-season hydropower in Sichuan and then shifting to coal regions like Xinjiang when the rains ended.
When Beijing cracked down in 2021, that mobility went global: US hash-rate share jumped from single digits to roughly 38% by early 2022, while Kazakhstan’s share spiked to around 18% as miners lifted whole farms and re-planted them in coal-heavy grids.
For the past year, US-based mining pools have mined over 41% of Bitcoin blocks.
Reuters recently reported that China’s share has quietly rebounded to around 14%, concentrated in provinces with surplus power.
ASICs are container-sized, depreciate in two to three years, and produce the same virtual asset regardless of where they sit. That lets hashrate slosh across borders in a way steel mills or AI campuses can’t.
When Kentucky exempts mining electricity from sales tax, or Bhutan offers long-term hydropower contracts, miners can pivot in months.
Bitcoin miners have concentrated in Texas, the Southeast, and Mountain West, regions where renewable energy curtailment creates surplus power at low prices.
A programmable knob and wasted-watts frontier
ERCOT treats specific large loads as “controllable load resources” that can be curtailed within seconds to stabilize frequency.
Lancium and other mining facilities brand themselves as CLRs, promising to ramp down almost instantly when prices spike or reserves thin. Riot’s July and August 2023 reports read like grid-services earnings releases, with millions in power and demand-response credits booked alongside far fewer self-mined coins during heat waves.
The OECD and national regulators now discuss Bitcoin as a flexible load that can either deepen renewable penetration or crowd out other uses.
Miners bid on interruptible power at rock-bottom rates, grid operators gain a buffer they can call on during tight supply, and the grid absorbs more renewable capacity without overbuilding transmission.
Bhutan’s sovereign wealth fund and Bitdeer are building at least 100 MW of mining powered by hydropower as part of a $500 million green-crypto initiative, monetizing surplus hydro and exporting “clean” coins. Officials reportedly used crypto profits to pay government salaries.
In West Texas, wind and solar fleets run into transmission bottlenecks, producing curtailment and negative prices.
That is where many US miners have situated, signing PPAs with renewable plants to take capacity that the grid cannot always absorb. Crusoe Energy brings modular generators and ASICs to remote oil wells, using associated…