Maximilian Obwexer had a problem.
He was heating his home in Austria with conventional heating oil, and it was expensive. A tinkerer by nature, and a former engineer having worked on hydropower plants, he was trying to find a better way to heat his home.
After many rounds of experimentation and having delved down the Bitcoin (mining) rabbit hole, three years ago he founded a company devoted to the effort. His company, 21energy, makes well-balanced, sturdy, and incredibly beautiful (and incredibly quiet!) miners for home use. The early models of Ofen 1 boasted up to 10 TH/s, while the premium model could reach, at top speed and making plenty of noise, 40 TH/s. Having scaled up production, hiring 12 new employees only this year and launching the new Ofen 2 (35-42 TH/s), the Bitcoin heater comes in the style of a conventional radiator — powered by Bitcoin. And yes, you can solo mine with this bitcoin heater… or join whichever pool you think is best.
“Bitcoin heaters are decentralized grid balancing — at home!” he proclaimed on stage in Helsinki on Friday before hundreds of curious faces in the audience at the inaugural Nordic Bitcoin conference BTCHel. Refreshingly, he spent most of his presentation not selling his excellent products or explaining his story in bitcoin, but on the many troubles afflicting the European grid.
Europeans are beholden to foreigners for importing energy. Its current electricity producers — legacy coal, gas and hydro — are increasingly asked to turn off their supply to the grid, in favor of the ever-more present wind turbines and solar panels. Fossil-fuel-based generation produces CO2 emissions as well as particles in the immediate environment, but its proposed replacements push dynamic and uncontrollable electricity generation onto the grid. At peak supply, even renewable energy providers are asked by grid management to curtail or wind down production; there is simply nobody to take the excess electricity, nowhere to put it
This is obviously bad in that it wastes potential electricity that could have been used, but even worse is that it makes the investment calculations for renewable energy investors worse. Not unrelated, households in Europe pay exorbitant rates for their electricity… and on top of that, heating in general is quite expensive.
When you put all of those aspects together, it’s like the old world is screaming out for Bitcoin mining. Obwexer agrees, “It’s a no-brainer — even if you don’t like or understand Bitcoin,” he tells me, standing next to his shiny green booth and radiators keeping the Expo hall in Helsinki real toasty.
Indeed, a large portion of his client base are “solar guys” — devoted climate change activists wanting to do something hands-on to de-fossilize their own energy use. While it’s not exactly the first group you think about being interested in Bitcoin, “The economics just make sense,” Obwexer tells me.
In a recent podcast interview with Knut Svanholm and Luke de Wolf, two of the co-organizers of BTCHel, Obwexer remarked that “Finland is really at the forefront of bitcoin heating and bitcoin district heating”:
“Europe needs Bitcoin mining so badly, with the high volatility in the electricity grids… we don’t have to fear the politicians too much, because… they already wrote it down — they just don’t see that they wrote Bitcoin mining everywhere.”
On stage in Helsinki, he showed one of the most important graphs in the entire economics and energy debate, which underlines precisely how crucial energy is for the well-being and flourishing of a society. “If you want a clean, rich, healthy society you need a lot of power.”
Up next for Obwexer and his team at 21energy is contributing to flexible load shedding on a grid level. Putting mobile miners in a truck and take production pressure off, e.g., hydro plants, is a perfect use case for Bitcoin mining: Instead of being asked to ramp down production because of an overloaded grid, they can divert the electricity stemming from their water flow to Bitcoin miners — which also changes their response time from minutes to seconds.
In general, using purpose-built or rebuilt Bitcoin miners for heating your home is the most obvious way to decentralize mining — especially since home miners are much less susceptible to the cutthroat economics of Bitcoin mining that, e.g., large mining farms are.
While solving several real-world energy problems at once, Obwexer and his team at 21energy are doing precisely that — “From Tyrol to the World.”
“I am super bullish on Bitcoin mining in Europe,” Obwexer concluded.
