By the time spring winds sweep across northern Germany next year, gigawatts of clean electricity will once again be told to go nowhere. Yet an unlikely catalyst — Bitcoin — may offer a new way forward, unlocking the next evolution of critical energy infrastructure in Europe.
Across the continent, wind turbines are feathered and solar parks are dialed down, not because Europe has too much energy, but because its grids can’t handle the peaks. In 2024, between 20 and 40 terawatt hours of renewable electricity were curtailed in Europe — roughly the annual consumption of a few million households. The power was there. The wires and market design were not.
For Harald Rauter, Chief Growth Officer at 21Energy and a board member of the European Bitcoin & Energy Association, that waste is more than a technical annoyance. It is, he argues, a monetary crisis hiding in plain sight.
“Energy is a prosperity currency,” he says. “If we build generation assets and can’t monetize 20 to 35 percent of their output at fair prices, we’re not just wasting electrons. We’re destroying capital and undermining Europe’s competitiveness.”
Rauter is not speaking from the usual corners of the crypto world. His background is in climate tech, impact investing and infrastructure strategy, with stints at climate-focused foundations and innovation bodies. Now, through 21Energy, he is making a case that would have sounded eccentric a decade ago: that Bitcoin mining should be treated as critical energy infrastructure in Europe.
From Speculation to “Pioneering Species”
Bitcoin mining has long been caricatured as an environmental villain — rows of noisy machines burning fossil fuel to earn digital coins. Rauter’s version is almost the mirror image: small, modular installations that live on the fringes of the energy system, feeding on electricity no one else can use.
“Think of Bitcoin mining as a pioneering species,” he says. “It can survive where other off-takers can’t. It’s geographically agnostic, can be switched off in seconds, and it only thrives where power is so cheap or so stranded that no competitor wants it.”
That flexibility is precisely what Europe’s increasingly renewable grids lack. As more wind and solar come online, balancing supply and demand has become an intricate dance around a fragile constant: 50 hertz grid frequency. Too much power and frequency ticks up; too little and it falls. Either way, someone has to adjust — quickly.
Today, that job is handled by a patchwork of gas plants, industrial loads and specialized reserve markets. But as intermittent renewables grow, the need for fast, controllable demand grows with them. A Bitcoin mine, Rauter argues, is almost purpose-built for this role.
The machines can bid capacity into reserve markets — promising to absorb power when frequency rises — and get paid simply for being on standby. When called, they draw electricity, stabilize the grid and simultaneously earn Bitcoin. In effect, the same hardware can be monetized twice: once as a grid-balancing asset, and again as a participant in the Bitcoin network.
“Once pre-qualified, these containers can be paid to sit idle and be ready,” Rauter explains. “If the grid needs them, they take power, help stabilize frequency and mine Bitcoin on top. You’re stacking revenue streams while solving a system problem.”
A Very European Mining Model
If that vision sounds far removed from the hyperscale mining farms in Texas or the Middle East, that’s because it is. Europe, Rauter insists, will never host those kinds of facilities — and shouldn’t try.
The continent’s generation fleet simply looks different. Where North America has colossal, centralized power plants, Europe is dominated by mid-scale and distributed assets: clusters of wind turbines, solar parks of 10 to 50 megawatts, municipal utilities. The political appetite for vast single-site data centers is limited; so is the grid capacity to serve them.
Instead, Rauter sees a modular, distributed model emerging as Europe’s natural path. At one end of the spectrum are containerized mining units placed directly at renewable sites — a 5, 20 or 50 megawatt solar farm that can route its surplus into a co-located mine instead of curtailing. At the other are Bitcoin “space heaters” for homes and businesses: sleek devices that warm rooms while quietly contributing hash rate to the network.
“Thermodynamically, one kilowatt in is one kilowatt hour of heat out,” he says. “So our heaters provide warmth as usual, but they also run mining in the background. The Bitcoin produced acts like a cashback on your heating bill.”
Aggregated across thousands of devices, that heat-reuse fleet itself becomes a flexible, distributed load that can respond to grid signals — throttling up when there’s excess wind at night, down when the system is stressed. A network of 10,000 heaters could represent around 10 megawatts of controllable demand, embedded not in a single industrial park, but across ordinary homes.
The economics hinge on revenue stacking. A single container or heater can:
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Monetize curtailed or distressed power at a known “price floor”.
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Earn fees from participation in grid-balancing or reserve markets.
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Produce heat that would otherwise be generated by a simple resistor or boiler.
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Mine Bitcoin, adding an asset-denominated upside.
In a sector used to single-purpose infrastructure, that multi-use profile is unusual. It is also, Rauter suggests, exactly what Europe’s expensive, strained energy system needs.
Regulation Is Not the Problem
If this all sounds at odds with Europe’s reputation as a regulatory heavy weight, Rauter is quick to flip the narrative.
On the financial side, the EU’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) brings long-sought clarity to the treatment of Bitcoin as an asset — how it is held, traded and supervised. On the energy side, directives such as RED3 (Renewable Energy Directive) and the Energy Efficiency Directive explicitly encourage flexible demand, sector coupling and heat reuse from computing infrastructure. Meanwhile, the Electricity Market Design framework prohibits discrimination against participants that make the system more efficient.
“From a legal perspective, the soil is surprisingly fertile,” he says. “The directives say: build renewables, couple sectors, reuse heat, improve flexibility. Bitcoin mining, if designed correctly, does all of that. The bottleneck isn’t regulation — it’s awareness.”
That gap is most acute, he argues, among the very institutions that stand to benefit: grid operators wrestling with frequency control costs; asset owners watching their IRRs erode as curtailment rises; infrastructure funds hunting for stable returns in a volatile rate environment.
Many still associate Bitcoin mining with 2017-era headlines about energy waste, not with today’s more technical debate over negative balancing power and curtailed megawatt hours. Others worry about reputational risk, even as their own legislative frameworks quietly invite the kind of flexibility services miners can provide.
“The burden of proof has shifted,” Rauter says. “We know how to build, finance and operate these systems. The question now is on the opponents: if you say this is bad, you need a better argument than ‘it uses energy’.”
A Race Between Physics and Politics
Europe’s energy crisis is not a story of simple scarcity. It is a story of misaligned timing and infrastructure: clean power arriving at the wrong place, at the wrong moment, with nowhere profitable to go.
As grids strain, manufacturers relocate and households face sticky high prices, the debate in Brussels and national capitals has focused on subsidies, capacity mechanisms and price caps. Rauter is proposing something more elemental: redesign parts of the demand side so that the system itself becomes more forgiving.
Whether Bitcoin mining will be allowed to play that role at scale remains uncertain. The technology’s public image is still tied to speculation and price charts, not to reserve markets and frequency control. But beneath that surface, in conference rooms from Prague to Bern, a different conversation is taking shape — one in which rows of humming machines are not symbols of excess, but tools in a European struggle for energy sovereignty and industrial survival.
Harald Rauter, Chief Growth Officer at 21energy, on LinkedIn
Co-Host Michael Blaschke on LinkedIn
Intelligence Brief by the Swiss Bitcoin Institute on ‘Abundant Power, Real Value: Turning Swiss Curtailment into Industrial Advantage’
Website of 21energy
21energy on Twitter
21energy on Instagramm
21energy on YouTube
21energy on LinkedIn
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