{"id":24642,"date":"2025-05-01T07:01:40","date_gmt":"2025-05-01T07:01:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=24642"},"modified":"2025-05-01T07:01:40","modified_gmt":"2025-05-01T07:01:40","slug":"bitcoin-mining-could-have-prevented-blackouts-in-spain-and-portugal-says-expert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=24642","title":{"rendered":"Bitcoin Mining Could Have Prevented Blackouts In Spain And Portugal, Says Expert"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

As investigators pore over the chain of events that plunged large swathes of Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France into darkness earlier this week, a prominent figure in the Bitcoin mining sector has argued that the catastrophe was \u201chighly unlikely\u201d to have unfolded had the Iberian grid been equipped with large-scale, fast-acting mining operations.<\/p>\n

Daniel Batten, an advisory-board member of Marathon Digital Holdings (NASDAQ: MARA) and co-founder of climate-technology investor CH4 Capital, used X to critique<\/a> what he called the \u201cpartial\u201d nature of Europe\u2019s renewable-energy transition. Batten posted a real-time generation snapshot taken at 12:30 p.m. local time, just five minutes before the cascading failure, showing the grid \u201crunning with very little \u2026 dispatchable spinning generation,\u201d the rotating mass of thermal or nuclear turbines that traditionally provides inertia and frequency stability.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin Mining May Hold The Key<\/h2>\n

\u201cWould large-scale Bitcoin mining deployment have prevented the power outages in Spain\/Portugal?\u201d he asked. \u201cShort answer: \u2018Yes.\u2019\u201d Batten contends that, in the absence of inertia from conventional plants, \u201crenewables<\/a> don\u2019t [provide it], making the grid more fragile if you don\u2019t have a way to very rapidly load-balance in the case of an outage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bitcoin miners, he argues, supply precisely that controllable load. In Texas, whose ERCOT system<\/a> recorded wind-and-solar penetration of 76% on one spring day, grid operators can curtail roughly 3 GW of mining demand in \u201cunder a second.\u201d That capability, Batten wrote, \u201cconsistently and instantly balance[s] frequency in lieu of spinning reserve,\u201d allowing ERCOT to ride through sudden supply-demand mismatches that would otherwise trigger the same automatic protections that collapsed the Iberian grid.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat happened in Spain and Portugal is not an inherent risk of renewables,\u201d Batten continued. \u201cIt\u2019s what happens when the renewable-energy transition is done in a partial way, without due consideration to load balancing \u2026 We have the solutions right under our noses, let\u2019s start using them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Batten\u2019s post drew immediate push-back from some. X user Aurum Digitalis replied that \u201cthe longer short answer is: We don\u2019t know. But it would have helped the grid by acting like a flexible load.\u201d Batten accepted the epistemic caution while maintaining his thesis: \u201cCorrect, the only way you can know something with certainty is if it happens. Equally, there is good evidence to say it\u2019s highly unlikely the event would still have happened \u2026 given that the root cause \u2026 was lack of spinning reserve at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spanish and Portuguese authorities have so far attributed the blackout to a \u201csignificant power imbalance\u201d that triggered automatic shutdowns designed to protect critical equipment. They have ruled out cyber-intrusion and are focusing on a technical failure somewhere in the synchronous Iberian Peninsula grid. Full service was restored overnight, but the incident has reignited debate over how quickly dispatchable backup and advanced demand response must scale as Europe approaches its 2030 renewable-energy targets.<\/p>\n

Batten insists that Bitcoin mining should be part of that toolkit, alongside batteries. He notes that mining infrastructure is \u201cmodular and low-cost to deploy\u201d and can reduce retail tariffs by absorbing excess generation that would otherwise be curtailed at the grid operator\u2019s expense. Batteries, he adds, \u201care part of the solution too,\u201d but serve a different niche because they deliver energy, whereas miners primarily absorb it on cue.<\/p>\n

At press time, BTC traded at $94,503.<\/p>\n

\"<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As investigators pore over the chain of events that plunged large swathes of Spain, Portugal and parts of southern France into darkness earlier this week, a prominent figure in the Bitcoin mining sector has argued that the catastrophe was \u201chighly unlikely\u201d to have unfolded had the Iberian grid been equipped with large-scale, fast-acting mining operations. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-24642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24642\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}