MicroBT Solar Mining: Turning Waste Heat into Revenue

Most miners treat heat as waste. Wright Wang of MicroBT wants it to be a second paycheck.

Wang spoke at Mining Disrupt Fort Lauderdale, held March twenty-fifth to twenty-seventh, twenty twenty-five, when Bitcoin traded at eighty-seven thousand, three hundred ninety-three dollars. Today it is eighty-three thousand and ninety-three dollars. He came up through MicroBT's research and development teams and now leads its sales teams, and his topic was how to make mining easier.

Mining has been around for about ten years, he said, and it is not easy anymore. It is a specialized business. Even with industry standards, every operator still has to customize for its own site, so his advice was to study an idea, simulate it, build it, check it against what you wanted, and improve from real feedback.

He started with timing and tariffs. Most US customers want machines built in the US, and MicroBT began US production about three years ago. The total tariff, he said, would reach over forty percent, and local production could cut that cost by almost half, while getting parts and support to customers faster.

Then he turned to partners. MicroBT miners run in air, immersion and hydro-cooling setups, and Wang said the goal is high-quality solutions, not just workable ones. The company invites solution providers to work with it, gives them a template of the key requirements, and helps them finish a system that meets their target. Beyond standardization, he said, customization is what matters most.

His first example was heat. A miner built only for mining does not need a hot outlet. But solution providers wanted to reuse the heat, to meet ESG requirements and to earn money from it. So MicroBT raised its outlet temperature to one hundred fifty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to heat buildings directly, and is moving to one hundred seventy-six. On his slide, heat recycling added forty, or almost five thousand, dollars a day. He pointed to a heat-reuse site in Finland and to greenhouses as other uses.

His second example was solar. Cheap power is hard to find, so some miners are building their own generation. Solar panels produce direct current, so MicroBT redesigned its power supplies to take DC. Its first DC miners carry breakers on top and a maximum power point tracking unit in the middle that balances load between the panels and the batteries. The off-grid layout has three parts: solar panels, battery containers and the DC mining system. MicroBT also helps plan when to charge the batteries and when to run from them after dark.

The point of all of it, Wang said, is to customize each setup for the operator's own scenario, with MicroBT and its partners supplying the pieces.

The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and the conversation continues at Mining Disrupt twenty twenty-seven, March twenty-second to twenty-fourth in Irving, Texas.