Café Bitcoin | Day 7 of 50: Daniel Batten on Bitcoin and Energy, Britain's Curtailment Bill, and Wealth Is Energy

• Cory was out for a family wedding, so Brady and Philip hosted from his handle. Also new: a weekly recap song in a different genre each week, covering everything from the previous weeks of the show.
• Daniel Batten on Cambridge's new number. Its updated assessment puts Bitcoin mining at 59.4% clean energy, against a global grid mix near 40%. Hydro is the largest single source. Full report expected later this year.
• Sweden's grid used Bitcoin mining 11,000 times last year to absorb excess wind. Batten's point: operators call it flexible load, flexible compute, or data centers. Anything but Bitcoin mining. Six Brazilian energy companies are doing the same with stranded generation.
• The best idea in the episode, and it's Batten's. A grid operator is incentivized to admit a problem, because saying so unlocks resources and doesn't destabilize the grid. A central banker never can, because the admission is itself the instability.
• Batten expects the West to adopt Bitcoin as an energy solution before a monetary one. In the global South the monetary problems are existential already: banking access, storing wealth safely, remittances that otherwise cost up to 20%.
• The Ethiopian dam. You cannot build half a dam, so it's sized for demand 20 years out. No transmission lines, no industry, no customer for the surplus. Miners paid roughly three cents per kilowatt hour and delivered over $100M in unexpected revenue.
• Callum Wheeler of Renew Blocks on Britain's curtailment bill. £1.5B last year paying wind farms to switch off and firing gas nearer London instead, forecast to reach £7B by 2030. A new "demand for constraints" market is meant to fix it.
• A near-blackout on June 23 reached the shadow energy secretary via control-room whistleblowers. Cause: unexpected air conditioning demand in Britain's fourth heat wave. Wheeler's pilot is mining co-located inside a Scottish Highlands hydro powerhouse, built for £2M and never switched on.
• Susie Violet Ward spent 13 months chasing a BBC correction on a headline claiming every Bitcoin payment uses a swimming pool of water. No correction, and the undisclosed source was a central banker. Brandolini's law: refuting costs ten times what inventing does.
• Closing round on first resources. Inventing Bitcoin by Yan Pritzker, including his family's story of carrying value out of Russia. Also the Bullish Case, Broken Money, swan.com/welcome with Natalie Brunell, and Mary Kay Fain's approach: ask someone to recall a time they couldn't use their own money.

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