nialljburke
Niall ⚡

Into energy & bitcoin, energy whisperer

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Last Notes

2026-06-20 23:09:23 UTC

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The caveat: this is a proof of concept, not policy advice. One wind farm, one year of prices, and the mining economics stay sensitive to the Bitcoin price and the 2028 halving.
Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2026.109454

2026-06-20 23:08:02 UTC

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Why it matters beyond Bitcoin: curtailment rises as wind build-out outpaces the grid. EirGrid has said surplus renewable generation could exceed 20% of available capacity by 2030 absent further flexibility.
Flexible demand is one lever, alongside storage and interconnection. It also runs into private wires, grid access, and how renewable support schemes are designed.

2026-06-20 23:07:34 UTC

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With the efficient hardware and a good dispatch strategy, the 5 to 20 MW builds pay back in roughly 2.2 to 4.4 years. Turn the assumptions the other way, network hashrate growth and the 2028 halving, and the same build can fail to pay back at all. The economics are that sensitive.

2026-06-20 23:06:49 UTC

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The headline result: a 20 MW S21 Hydro miner raised total system revenue, the wind farm plus the miner, by 32%, from €22.2M to €29.2M, and lifted the effective capacity factor from 29% to 32%.
It does this by absorbing 83% of the farm's annual dispatch-down energy.
Why not just build a bigger miner? Past about 30 MW you stop soaking up wasted wind (30 MW already captures 93% of it) and start buying grid power to mine, which is a different argument. The sensible range sits around 20 to 30 MW.
https://blossom.primal.net/a641eb5f628a84a35e73816c9f1ea1fc6532d2afb073a7d8dda7b50110bd60dc.jpg

2026-06-20 23:05:40 UTC

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Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2026.109454
Short answer, on real 2024 Irish market data: yes, but only with efficient hardware and a sensible dispatch strategy.
What we modelled: a 100 MW Irish wind farm, a miner from 0 to 90 MW, 2024 I-SEM hourly prices, two hardware generations (the old Antminer S9 and the more efficient S21 Hydro), six operating strategies, and a full six-year appraisal.

2026-06-20 23:02:41 UTC

We've just published this in Energy Economics:
Sarnecki, M. & Burke, N. (2026). "Bitcoin Mining as Supply-Side Flexibility in Irish Wind Energy Integration"
In 2024, EirGrid dispatched down 10.1% of Ireland's available wind. In 2025, 11.4%. That is clean power we could have generated but were not able to use.
Can a co-located Bitcoin miner turn some of it into revenue?
Paper below 👇
https://blossom.primal.net/4782f4dc6197aa84153f36df8fe93796eea620a796ac08cac492cce2a666cbf6.jpg

2025-11-21 19:04:06 UTC

Curious what the collective brain capacity of Ireland actually is?
Start from the basics:
An average adult burns 2200–3000 kcal/day (men) or 1800–2400 kcal/day (women).
That’s roughly 100 W total body power (24-hour average).
The brain takes a flat ~20 W of that, regardless of sex or size.
Of those 20 W, only 1–5 W supports conscious reasoning and deliberate computation. The rest runs vision, balance, heartbeat, memory maintenance, etc.
Ireland’s population: ~5.3 million.
Upper estimate (5 W/person conscious): 5.3 M × 5 W = 26.5 MW nationwide.
Lower (1 W/person): 5.3 MW.
Realistic range for deliberate thinking: 5–27 MW total.
Now the machines:
Ireland’s ~90 hyperscale data centres pull ~1.3 GW (1,300 MW) for IT load alone (2024–2025 figures).
That’s 48–260× more electricity than the entire country’s conscious-thinking budget.
Efficiency comparison:
- Human conscious slice: 0.3–3 petaFLOPS from 5–27 MW → 0.01–0.6 GFLOPS/watt
- Irish data-centre fleet (2024–2025 GPUs): 2–6 exaFLOPS from 1.3 GW → 1.5–4.6 GFLOPS/watt
(FLOP = one floating-point operation, e.g. adding/multiplying decimals).
So the machines deliver 1000–20 000× the raw throughput and 100–500× better performance per watt than the deliberate-thinking portion of every Irish brain combined.
Rough numbers, wide ranges, but the gap is real and widening fast.
A few square kilometres of server halls now out-compute and out-efficiency the focused minds of 5.3 million people 😀

2025-08-16 22:14:41 UTC

Educated up to Ph.D., I've fully progressed through the Dunning-Kruger rollercoaster into an expertise in energy, where I believe I teach it competently, and I now earn a decent living from that.
However, to my shame, my biggest mistake in life was avoiding the adult requirement to deeply understand what exactly money is, how it works, how we are taught nothing of value on it, and I'm still working to recover from that deficiency to this day.
I do however hope that in the future my kids wont need to understand money in the same way, as they'll just earn, spend and save in the hardest money there ever has been: bitcoin.

2024-09-01 08:23:58 UTC

Green light given to 600ac solar farm in Kildare
https://www.independent.ie/farming/news/green-light-given-to-600ac-solar-farm-in-kildare/a1740791946.html

2024-08-30 20:56:00 UTC

Hi Brazil 👋👋😁

2024-08-27 09:24:37 UTC

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GM 🫡

2024-08-16 16:22:32 UTC

lol
https://m.primal.net/KBdf.jpg

2024-07-19 12:30:59 UTC

Martin Luther monument, Worms, Germany, erected in 1868.
https://m.primal.net/JWSQ.jpg

2024-07-19 11:46:47 UTC

Twitter's so glitchy and keeps crashing. TG for nostr 😁
https://m.primal.net/JWQQ.jpg

2024-06-09 13:40:50 UTC

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not tech savy but a bitcoiner with expertise in energy, and here for the freedom tech 😁

2024-05-09 20:29:54 UTC

bitcoin is a store of prosperity

2024-04-26 08:27:06 UTC

I'm a big fan of renewables but we cannot escape the reality that fossil fuel utilisation has been the single most successful way in which poverty has been crushed over the past century, even in the face of a population explosion (driven by energy prosperity).
Climate fanaticism has become a doom cult.
https://m.primal.net/IABw.png

2024-04-11 09:43:29 UTC

😁
https://m.primal.net/HthC.jpg

2024-04-11 09:40:35 UTC

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sorry, Dan!

2024-04-11 09:39:52 UTC

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thanks Conor 👋😃

2023-03-05 19:32:37 UTC

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Just different, no?

2023-02-22 23:09:11 UTC

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Maybe too late, and a little unorthodox, however the answer is 316 😁
21 + 10 > 1²+((2+1)*10)=31
22 + 20 > 2²+((2+2)*20)=84
23 + 30 > 3²+((2+3)*30)=159
24 + 50 > 4²+((2+4)*50)=316

2023-02-21 22:05:46 UTC

What happens if the central bank tightening causes a gdp contraction, asset values crushed, major unemployment, but CPI remains stubbornly high as it's a supply issue, not a demand one. 🤔

2023-02-21 21:19:24 UTC

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This this gonna be sensational

2023-02-21 21:19:04 UTC

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Recieved thanks! 🤣

2023-02-21 19:53:12 UTC

I'm here for the censorship resistance, and the integrated Lighting Network payment system 👌