Bitcoin in the bush - crypto mining brings power to rural areas

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Not many people here know or care about the bitcoin mine that's played a part in helping the hydro-plant keep things going.
But soon they'll watch as that container once again rattles its way through the town on its way to another location.
Zengamina Hydro has secured a large investment to help them expand to more villages and join up to the national grid.
Soon the excess energy the mine was harvesting will be sold back to the national grid and mining bitcoin will no longer be profitable at Zengamina.
Phillip and team are sanguine about this and insist this is good news. They will have had a successful few years here and ultimately they are happy to have helped Zengamina. And made a tidy profit in bitcoin of course.
The company says there are plenty of places with so-called stranded energy that they can plonk their bitcoin mine next to.
Gridless already has six sites like this in three different African countries.
North of Zengamina another bitcoin mine slurps up excess energy from a hydro-electric plant run by Virunga National Park in the Congo. It's helping to fund conservation projects, the park says.
But Gridless now plans an ambitious next move - to build their own hydro-plants from scratch to mine for bitcoin and bring electricity to rural areas.
The company's co-founder Janet Maingi says the company is busy raising tens of millions of dollars for the project.
They're focusing on so-called run-of-river hydroelectric models like at Zengamina and the continent has an abundance of "untapped hydro potential" she says.
"A consumer-driven, adaptive energy model is essential for scalable, affordable, and sustainable energy access that meets the needs of African communities," she explains.
The company is not a charity and believes that ensuring long-term economic viability for developers and investors can only be done through bitcoin.
Finding locations for a new plant or to tap into existing ones is the easy part though.
The company still faces resistance from some authorities and companies which see bitcoin as an energy-greedy and selfish use of electricity that might otherwise be used by rural people.
But the company insists that the incentive is always to sell to the highest buyer and that will always, they say, be the local community.
History tells us that without incentives or rules in place, bitcoin mining at scale can put strain on public energy grids. In Kazakhstan in 2020-2021 a mining boom increased energy usage in the country by 7% before the government clamped down and clipped the wings of the burgeoning industry.

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