Can Bitcoin Mining Make Renewable Energy More Profitable?

Bitcoin’s (BTC ) proof-of-work (PoW) security model requires massive energy use, as miners compete computationally to validate blocks, a competition that has now reached an industrial scale. Electricity alone represents over 80% of miners’ cash-based operating expenses.

While hardware has become more efficient, it doesn’t eliminate the economic pressure created by growing competition and shrinking profitability, which increasingly depends on access to very cheap electricity, operational flexibility, and high Bitcoin prices.

This need for low-cost power creates a natural connection with renewable generation. Solar and wind have very low marginal generation costs once built, and renewable capacity is growing rapidly worldwide. But renewables also face challenges, including high initial investment costs and managing surplus and deficit power in off-grid systems.

Power-to-Hydrogen (P2H) technology can partly address these challenges by converting surplus electricity into green hydrogen, while crypto mining, as a flexible load, can convert some of that surplus into a tradable digital asset.

This points to an overlooked role for Bitcoin mining in renewable energy economics (RET ), not as physical energy storage but as a flexible financial outlet for electricity. By dynamically choosing between selling power and converting it into digital assets, renewable operators may be able to monetize intermittency rather than paying to eliminate it with batteries. A recent study provides an excellent foundation for exploring the emergence of a new type of infrastructure company sitting between energy generation, Bitcoin mining, and computational demand.

As Miners Struggle, Renewable Power Offers a New Outlet

The trillion-dollar market cap crypto asset started the year just under $100,000, only to drop to $60,000 in the first few days of February.

Over the next three months, Bitcoin slowly climbed past $82K, only to give up those gains and then some. The price then fell even lower, going under $59,000 in late June. The past two weeks, however, have brought back some excitement, with the price rallying to $80,000. This volatility is sitting on top of a much bigger structural shift, though: miner block rewards are getting smaller while hash price is collapsing.

Hash price is the standard measure of daily mining revenue per unit of computing power. It fell to a low of $27.74 per petahash per second in June before recovering somewhat to about $40, in tandem with BTC price.

Even as BTC experiences a sharp rebound, the price is still far below the mining cost, with the average mining cost sitting above $104,000 and the economics of producing Bitcoin remaining under pressure.

That is despite Bitcoin’s difficulty recording ten downward adjustments against seven increases this year, currently sitting around 125.8 trillion, down from the peak of 156 trillion in early November 2025.

The drop in difficulty indicates that many miners have turned off their machines and left the network, unable to cover their electricity costs or operational expenses. With fewer machines competing to solve blocks, remaining miners face less network competition.

This is a self-correcting mechanism: Bitcoin automatically adjusts its difficulty roughly every two weeks to ensure blocks are found at a steady average of ten minutes. Lower difficulty temporarily increases profit margins for surviving miners with access to cheap electricity. The same dynamic is playing out in hashrate, which has fallen from its 1.26 ZH/s peak to about 900 EH/s, though it has recovered from this year’s low of 686.9 EH/s hit on January 31.

Data from Wu Blockchain indicates that almost 23% of 22 major Bitcoin mining machines have been operating at a loss as of early August. It noted at the time:

“Under current electricity-cost and network assumptions, the most energy-efficient model has an estimated shutdown price of about $46,787, meaning even top-performing machines would approach break-even if BTC falls below that level.”

Rising costs and depressed prices have weakened mining economics, forcing some operators to sell their Bitcoin, reduce capacity, or pivot hard into AI data centers and power infrastructure.

Miners face high costs from multiple directions, including reduced rewards set to be halved again to 1.5625 BTC per block in April 2028, expensive hardware, and massive electricity requirements.

The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance estimates annual Bitcoin mining electricity consumption at around 138 TWh, equivalent to about 0.54% of global electricity use. On the positive side, its survey found that 42.6% of miners’ electricity comes from renewables. The share of sustainable sources rises to 52.4% when nuclear power is included, raising a fascinating question for renewable energy developers.

Interestingly, solar and wind projects, though intermittent, often generate more energy than immediate demand or available grid capacity can absorb.

In response, system operators store excess energy for later use, pay large consumers to absorb more power immediately, or curtail generation, wasting that extra power. Bitcoin miners, with their massive power needs, offer an attractive alternative.

More importantly, their energy draw is mobile and flexible. Miners can adjust their consumption within seconds, have no obligation to serve a fixed load, and are often located near cheap, stranded, or curtailed power sources such as hydropower, flared associated gas, and surplus wind and solar that would otherwise go unused.

There have been several instances of this flexibility. So not only can renewable electricity power Bitcoin mining, but Bitcoin mining could potentially become a revenue-generating outlet for electricity that might otherwise be curtailed or sold at unattractive prices.

A new study tests this idea by treating cryptocurrency mining not merely as an electricity-consuming activity but as one component of a broader revenue-optimization strategy alongside electricity sales and green hydrogen production.

It’s not only about making Bitcoin mining green, but about helping renewable plants improve their economics by dynamically choosing among several ways to monetize electricity.

The Real Opportunity Isn’t Mining Alone, but Choosing the Most Profitable Path

The study titled ‘Virtual Energy Storage through Profit Optimization: A Risk-Based Framework for Hybrid Solar-Wind Systems with Hydrogen and Cryptocurrency Revenues¹‘ takes a new approach to the renewable-storage problem.

Instead of treating renewable generation, storage, and cryptocurrency mining as separate problems, it treats green hydrogen production and crypto mining as substitutes for storage.

Hydrogen can be stored and sold later, while cryptocurrency can be accumulated and monetized as market conditions allow. These two are seen as virtual ways to bank surplus energy as a tradable asset rather than as stored electrons.

The researchers modeled a 10 MW solar-wind hybrid plant in Portland, Oregon, and back-tested it against five years of real market data from January 2020 to January 2025, a window that deliberately spans the COVID-19 shock, the European gas crisis, and a full crypto boom-bust cycle including the collapses of LUNA and FTX.

The resulting framework is called DRIL-FRP (Decentralized Renewable Systems with Autonomous Investment Logic, Full-Capacity, and Risk-Integrated Profit Modeling).

The novel framework for the economic operation of decentralized hybrid power plants compares three revenue paths, namely direct electricity sales, green hydrogen production, and mining of Bitcoin alongside Bitcoin Cash (BCH ) and eCash, as well as combinations of all three, choosing whichever pathway is most profitable on any given day. What do the results show?

“Comprehensive technical, financial, and risk assessments indicate that these systems can generate diversified income with minimal dependence on the power grid and conventional storage systems,” says the study.

In the baseline scenarios, Bitcoin delivered the best results, as the only option to recover its investment within five years. Bitcoin mining generated $17.09 million in revenue and $14.12 million in operational profit during this period, producing a positive 4.01% ROI and a 4.81-year payback period.

In comparison, electricity-only sales generated $8.08 million in revenue but had a negative 18.38% ROI. Hydrogen did even worse, generating $7.93 million while carrying a negative 50.48% ROI because of its higher capital requirements and immature pricing markets, making it the weakest performer despite its storage advantages.

The combined scenarios produced an even more nuanced result. The three-crypto model was again the winner and also performed even better, generating $19.50 million in revenue, $16.54 million in operating profit, and a 21.81% ROI, with a payback period of about four years.

As for the fully hybrid model, it had access to all three revenue pathways and dynamically selected among them. It generated the highest revenue at $19.55 million as well as the highest absolute operating profit of the three at $17.04 million over five years. But its ROI was negative at -3.27%, because the heavy upfront capital expenditure outweighed its five-year financial return. This shows how raw profit and return on invested capital can tell very different stories.

It’s important to note that the research doesn’t show that Bitcoin mining automatically makes renewable projects profitable, but rather that Bitcoin can be valuable as one component of a flexible revenue portfolio.

For instance, the model found that electricity sales outperformed Bitcoin mining on 863 days during the five-year period, even though Bitcoin was the strongest baseline scenario overall.

What this suggests is that a renewable plant shouldn’t commit all of its generation to mining. Instead, it may benefit from switching between electricity sales, crypto mining, and hydrogen depending on which pathway offers the best economics at any given point in time.

This point is reinforced by the risk results. The researchers applied a Risk-Adjusted Return on Capital (RAROC) metric, alongside volatility, maximum drawdown, Value at Risk, and Sharpe ratio calculations, to compare energy and crypto revenue streams on a level playing field.

Cryptocurrency-based scenarios, as one would expect, had exceptionally high volatility. But despite having the highest annualized volatility of any scenario at over 2,400% as well as the deepest historical drawdown, the multi-crypto mix had the highest RAROC of all pathways. This means that crypto’s return relative to the risk taken was, by this measure, the most attractive in the study.

The electricity-Bitcoin scenario came second, recording the highest Sharpe ratio at 4.75, which the authors flagged as excellent by conventional finance benchmarks.

Bitcoin profitability, as the study found and as expected, was strongly positively related to its price and negatively related to network difficulty.

A rise in BTC price could increase revenue by as much as 50%, while an increase in network difficulty alone could reduce revenue by roughly 33.33%, making mining a potentially powerful revenue mechanism but also highly market-sensitive.

For investors and renewable developers, this study suggests that flexible mining load, when treated as a risk-management tool rather than a speculative bet, can materially improve a hybrid plant’s financial resilience and shorten payback periods that pure electricity or hydrogen sales cannot achieve on their own, at least not without the capital burden of battery storage.

The study is not without limitations, though. It uses Portland as a hypothetical baseline, assumes a 50-50 nominal solar-wind capacity split, uses 2025 equipment prices, excludes taxes and regulations, assumes ideal market access, and limits the daily dispatch decision to a single revenue pathway rather than allowing continuous fractional allocation among products.

Most importantly, its five-year back-test ends in January 2025, so its profitability figures should not be read as forecasts of 2026 returns. The study authors noted:

“Overall, the ultimate aim of this model is to provide a tested feasibility framework and a foundation for implementing real-time decision-making systems.”

MARA Holdings (NASDAQ: MARA)

In crypto mining, MARA Holdings is one of the biggest names to have moved beyond being purely a miner toward owning energy infrastructure. Last year, it acquired a Texas wind farm specifically to operate behind-the-meter computing against otherwise underutilized renewable generation.

MARA has been operating one of the world’s largest Bitcoin mining platforms for about a decade. It boasts 19 data centers across four continents, and this experience has enabled the company to serve the compute infrastructure sector.

With the four largest hyperscalers alone expected to invest $725 billion in AI infrastructure during 2026, annual capex projected to exceed $1 trillion by 2027, and US data center electricity demand reaching 66 gigawatts in 2027, while new power generation and transmission continue to lag demand, MARA is focused on owning scarce powered assets and maximizing their long-term value.

But that doesn’t mean the company has lost sight of its core business. MARA defines Bitcoin mining as its foundation, not its destination, one that generates cash flow to support investment across the business, provides operational flexibility for immediate monetization of power, and offers operational insight.

“We do not view Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure as competing businesses. They are complementary applications of the same underlying asset: power.”

– CEO Fred Thiel

He describes the flexibility to deploy power dynamically as market conditions evolve as one of the company’s “greatest competitive strengths” and a key driver of its AI infrastructure growth.

“We are an owner, developer, and operator of digital infrastructure, vertically integrated across power, land, and compute. We do not sell electrons. We convert them into higher-value compute or make that infrastructure available to customers,” Thiel said. “What separates MARA from peers is that we already have what most are still trying to secure: active utility-scale power, a decade of operating experience at scale, and disciplined capital allocation. Our evolution into AI infrastructure is not a departure from our past. It is the natural progression of what we have built.”

With a market cap of $4.334 billion, MARA stock is currently trading at $11.50, up 25% YTD. It has an EPS (TTM) of -9.35 and a P/E (TTM) of -1.20. As for its financials, the Bitcoin miner-turned-AI infrastructure provider reported revenue of $174.9 million for Q2 2026, down 27% from $238.5 million a year earlier.

MARA recorded a net loss of $611.3 million, or $1.60 per diluted share, compared to net income of $808.2 million in the year-ago period, driven in part by a $343 million fair-value loss on crypto. Adjusted EBITDA was negative $360.9 million, compared to a $1.2 billion profit in Q2 2025.

During this period, MARA mined 2,422 BTC at an average price of about $71,325. It didn’t buy any Bitcoin but sold 2,213 BTC at an average price of $73,078, and further sales are expected.

Despite these sales and a 29% decline in its treasury, MARA remains the fourth-largest Bitcoin holder among public companies, with 35,577 BTC, including 9,270 BTC that have been either loaned or pledged as collateral.

The company also reported a 22% YoY increase in energized hashrate to 70.3 EH/s. Its cost per kWh was $0.04 in Q2 2026 and cost per petahash per day was $27.7, an improvement of 4%.

MARA is currently working on completing its Long Ridge acquisition, expected to deliver immediate positive EBITDA once regulatory approval is received. It will also expand AI capacity at its Hannibal campus. The company has already added 2 GW through a recently acquired powered land site in Matagorda County, Texas. Together, these projects can expand MARA’s power portfolio to 4.8 gigawatts.

Conclusion

Bitcoin’s energy consumption has long been a concern, and miners have addressed it through renewable energy use. But this isn’t a one-way relationship where only sustainable sources help mining with cheap and green power.

Bitcoin mining can also help renewable energy become more profitable, but only under specific conditions: cheap, often curtailed power; efficient hardware; disciplined capital spending; and, ideally, a diversified mix of revenue streams that doesn’t rely on crypto prices alone.

The opportunity lies in turning renewable plants into flexible energy-to-value platforms, redirecting power toward whichever buyer, whether the grid, an electrolyzer, a mining rig, or an AI data center, pays the most on a given day.

References

1. Mahmoodpoor, R., Kiyoumarsioskouei, A., Jafari, F. & Hossainpour, S. Virtual energy storage through profit optimization: A risk-based framework for hybrid solar–wind systems with hydrogen and cryptocurrency revenues. Results in Engineering, 112494 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rineng.2026.112494