Thread by @level39

(THREAD) The stage has been set for #Bitcoin to incentivize renewable energy and power a greener future. @Tesla and @elonmusk have the technology and ingenuity to solve one of the greatest challenges facing humanity. A dawn of optimism and hope is coming into focus. /1

Feb 2019: @CathieWood interviewed @elonmusk on @ARKInvest's podcast. Elon said, "I'm not sure it would be a good use of Tesla's resources to get involved in crypto. We are really just trying to accelerate the advance of sustainable energy." /2

Two years later, @Tesla has since added $1.5B of Bitcoin to its balance sheet and now accepts Bitcoin as payment. Since then, the company has been raked over the coals by environmentalists and critics who were triggered by the move. /3

@Tesla's mission of accelerating the advance of sustainable energy has not changed. And almost no one has given even the slightest thought about how Elon could use Bitcoin to incentivize solar. /4

In the past month alone:

Fortune
Bloomberg
NYT
The Independent
BBC
Forbes
Financial Times
CBS
Telegraph
Time
The Guardian

have all parroted the same anti-#Bitcoin narrative from self-described “hobbyist” Alex de Vries who, as it turns out, works for the Dutch Central Bank. /5

On #EarthDay last week, the Bitcoin Clean Energy Initiative (BCEI) released a memorandum with @sqcrypto and @ARKInvest, that caused further uproar. squ.re/BCEI-whitepaper. @elonmusk publicly endorsed it. And the Alex de Vries anti-Bitcoin media machine again went into action. /6

The BCEI memo itself went largely undiscussed, which is a shame, since it appears to give away @Tesla's game plan. It very clearly describes using #Bitcoin, solar and batteries to "overgrow" solar energy and solve the problem of the "Duck Curve". /7

The @NREL Duck Curve is the greatest challenge facing solar energy, at scale. Watch this 4-minute video and you'll quickly grasp the issue. /8

Power companies supply the least amount of power overnight. Then ramp up in the morning. Then at sunset, energy demand peaks. As more people adopt solar energy, it causes problems in this demand curve. /9

The sun produces the most energy at mid-day. Every year means new solar capacity, which makes mid-day demand "belly" lower and lower. Researchers call this drop in demand the "Duck Curve". The belly of the curve grows deeper every year. /10

From the regional grid managers' perspective, it looks like a drop in demand. It's neither cost effective, nor possible, to transmit all the excess solar energy into the grid. Much of it is stranded or curtailed. /11

slate.com/business/2016/…

As the sun sets, solar energy production ends just as the demand for energy typically peaks. Power plants then have to rapidly ramp up production to compensate for that. Which is difficult to do with the current fleet of power infrastructure. /12

The second problem is economic. Say you have a couple of nuclear and coal plants. Those plants are only economic when they are running all the time, basically. They run around the clock. /13

And if you have to turn them off at mid-day, it completely screws up their economics and plus lots of utilities just have contracts with those power plants to keep them running all the time. /14

So that creates sort of an artificial floor. If solar generates more power than can be stored in batteries, and there's no use for it, there's no one to consume it. The solar has to be shut off and curtailed. /15

If the excess solar power wasn't curtailed, we could risk overloading or even damaging the power grid. So we throw away that extra solar energy. /16

Effectively, what's happening is that solar power is being wasted. That waste, curtailment, is the big challenge moving forward for solar energy. /17

If you want solar to eventually power everything, or close to everything, we've got to figure out some way of shifting it to the night time. /18

The Duck Curve cannot be solved with current infrastructure and storage. This makes solar adoption less appealing and less profitable, but also wasteful. If @Tesla cannot figure out how to solve this problem, the technology won't scale and adoption will stagnate. /19

How does this relate to #Bitcoin?

Tesla recently announced Tesla Solar Panels & Solar Roof will only be sold as an integrated product *with* Tesla Powerwall battery. /20

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1385042598692147204

This would make @Tesla solar configurations poor investments. A home, with a $100/month electric bill, would require $20K upfront for just the panels and not break-even for 17 years. After 25 years one would save $13K if not for the $12.5K Powerwall. 25 years to save $500?? 🤔/21

However, this creates an integrated solar product that can link to the power grid and Tesla devices. Powerwall will sit "behind the meter" and have the ability to intelligently store excess energy or put it to good use. /22

Tesla now makes its own custom ASICs. For example, their Full Self Driving (FSD) chip. Powerwalls could ship with a full node and @Tesla ASICs that intelligently switch between pooled #Bitcoin mining or selling to the grid, when demand increases, for maximum profit. /23

In other words, Tesla could create a massive green mining pool to consume the solar "Duck Belly" and turn it into #Bitcoin. /24

The BCEI memo was all about using a combination of solar, batteries and Bitcoin to solve the Duck Curve. Tesla just happens to have all of these in its bag already. All they need is a way to intelligently pool that power into hash whenever it makes the most sense. /25

Not only does the BCEI memo spell out how #Bitcoin works in this strategy, it also links to this brilliant article by, @MaxAWebster, which artfully explains virtual power plants and miner amortization /26

versionone.vc/the-solar-bitc…

Tesla could pay customers, for sacrificing their Duck Bellies, in whatever currency they wanted: Bitcoin, fiat, #DOGE or stablecoins. The customer would earn money and Tesla would add the mining rewards to their #Bitcoin treasury. (Smart customers would demand payment in ₿). /27

So, imagine you have a #Bitcoin Powerwall. It learns your energy habits and intelligently spends the excess energy on either hashing or selling back to the grid, whichever is more profitable. /28

Although @Tesla has an obvious advantage in this area, this strategy is something other device makers could employ if they partnered with solar companies. /29

People might argue that the excess power were better spent on scientific computations. And perhaps a market could be made for these other computations. But, with all that distributed computing power, it would drive the cost of all those other competing computations to zero. /30

Only Bitcoin's closed thermodynamics offers the ability to absorb all that excess energy, like a black hole, without driving the cost of the computations to zero. No other asset on the planet can do that. /31

Only a neutral Proof of Work asset, like #Bitcoin — free of the taint from premine or fallible figureheads — has the ability to eat curtailed solar energy for breakfast. Proof of stake is bulimic when it comes to eating energy. /32

Listen to @michael_saylor explain how #Bitcoin acts as a thermodynamic closed loop battery, for energy /33

Read Nikola Tesla's "The Problem of Increasing Human Energy" where he describes how humanity needs to use more energy to increase the force accelerating human progress, by harnessing the sun's energy. /34

The BCEI memo suggests that putting a fraction of solar to work, mining Bitcoin, would dwarf existing (dirty) mining operations. /35

squ.re/BCEI-whitepaper

The BCEI, @Jack and @elonmusk are hinting that this strategy, at scale, would effectively turn ₿ into a massive green energy project—unlike anything anyone has ever seen before.

Similar strategies could be used with other energy sources like wind, hydro, or geothermal./36

Bitcoin has the potential to solve one of the greatest challenges facing the solar industry and humanity. And the innovators that are going to make it happen just published the game plan, in broad daylight. /37

The BCEI memo introduces @ARKInvest's "Solar + Battery + Bitcoin Mining" model, and links to their blog post which says the systems "should work at all scales and could create interesting opportunities at the 🚨RESIDENTIAL🚨 level". /39

wintonark.medium.com/bitcoin-mining…

It would appear that @ARKInvest is open-sourcing the "Solar + Battery + Bitcoin Mining" model, to get constructive feedback for @Tesla, before it is considered for residential use, at scale. /40