Stories · as read on the Mining station
Selling the Heat: GREENTECH's Case for Mining in the Netherlands
Jelmer ten Wolde argued that selling the heat from miners, not chasing cheaper power, is what keeps mining profitable in Europe.
A Bitcoin mine in the Netherlands told a Miami audience it was being paid to mine. Jelmer ten Wolde, co-founder and CEO of GREENTECH, made that claim at Mining Disrupt Miami in July 2022. Bitcoin was trading at $21,268 that week. Today it is $83,316.
Ten Wolde's company runs miners in one of the most expensive energy markets in the world. When GREENTECH started some of its sites, gas cost eight cents a cubic meter. By that summer, he said, it cost one euro seventy. Germany and the Netherlands, he told the room, were going back to coal.
His answer was not cheaper power. It was selling what miners usually throw away. In his words: "as miners you're all focused on heat removal but the heat has a value and it's only half of the picture." He listed who buys that heat: greenhouses, fish farms, breweries and laundry services. And he made the local case for it.
Most mining sites end up in rural areas because towns do not want a loud, air-cooled building that creates no jobs. Heat customers change that. "the applications are immense and the cherry on the cake these heat users create real jobs," he said. The second income stream comes from the grid.
Wind and solar are intermittent, and grid operators in Western Europe pay large users to cut or raise their consumption to avoid overload. GREENTECH runs its miners overclocked and sells the extra kilowatts as flexibility, so the machines never stop. He called it a market worth billions and said similar markets exist in the United States. Then came the numbers from two live sites.
At a farm in the Netherlands, S19j Pro miners rated at 96 terahash run at an average of 160. The site earns up to 40 euros a megawatt hour for load balancing. That month, he said, the farm's energy cost turned negative. The second site is a greenhouse growing ornamental plants for IKEA.
At the gas price of the day, he valued its heat at more than three million euros, which the company counts as a discount on its energy bill. The hardware behind it is the GreenBox, a turnkey unit built on GREENTECH's own patented immersion technology. It sits between energy production and consumption and connects to the grid or to gas. Ten Wolde described the company as becoming a link in the value chain, not the end user of power.
He ended with a plan, not a result: a district heating network in Finland of up to 30 megawatts, heating part of a city with heat from mining. Ten Wolde's figures are the ones he gave on stage. His argument was that a miner's heat and flexibility are worth as much as cheap power. The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.