Because “climate” is an extremely hot topic in Europe we’re focusing on “carbon negative” mining solutions. Fact is, that it’s the only way to mine profitably in Europe. You need to

-use the heat

-have large scale consumption

-input excess electricity from renewables.

Ticking all three boxes is even better.

The reason large corporations like Facebook and Google are in the Netherlands is due to extremely cheap electricity for large consumers. No tax for them while there’s a high tax for the general population (>50% over energy). When the natural gas prices soared, the population paid the bill to compensate the long term contracts for the large corporate consumers.

Because the population saw prices of far over €1,- per kWh almost everyone started to install solar. Yesterday and today this already resulted in negative prices on grid electricity. Our transformers at the solar setups shut down, due to overload on the grid. If you can’t use all electricity you produce, you physically can’t deliver it on the grid anymore. The first projects where we mine away the overcapacity at small farms are starting this summer. There is not much choice, it’s either mine it or find another way to consume it directly. And these farmers don’t have another way to consume it directly. Netherlands will become a distributed bitcoin mining heaven with all this insanely rapid build out overcapacity of renewables in a contracting economy. If we would use Google, Facebook and other corporations less the national consumption of electricity would actually drop significantly. The question now is, what is more important? Financial sovereignty or a viral cat? Free market decides. The cats will keep on winning until the true price of the viral cat starts to be paid. I believe that time might be more near than we think.