{"id":98277,"date":"2025-08-17T07:23:36","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T07:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/17\/home-bitcoin-mining-is-going-to-heat-europe\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T07:23:36","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T07:23:36","slug":"home-bitcoin-mining-is-going-to-heat-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/neclink.com\/index.php\/2025\/08\/17\/home-bitcoin-mining-is-going-to-heat-europe\/","title":{"rendered":"Home Bitcoin Mining Is Going To Heat Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Maximilian Obwexer had a problem.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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<\/a> (35-42 TH\/s), the Bitcoin heater comes in the style of a conventional radiator \u2014 powered by Bitcoin. And yes, you can solo mine<\/a> with this bitcoin heater\u2026 or join whichever pool<\/a> you think is best.<\/p>\n

\u201cBitcoin heaters are decentralized grid balancing \u2014 at home!\u201d he proclaimed on stage in Helsinki on Friday before hundreds of curious faces in the audience at the inaugural Nordic Bitcoin conference BTCHel<\/a>. Refreshingly, he spent most of his presentation not<\/em> selling his excellent products or explaining his story in<\/a> bitcoin, but on the many troubles afflicting the European grid.<\/p>\n

Europeans are beholden to foreigners for importing energy. Its current electricity producers \u2014 legacy coal, gas and hydro \u2014 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<\/a> generation onto the grid<\/a>. 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<\/p>\n

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<\/em>. Not unrelated, households in Europe pay exorbitant rates for their electricity\u2026 and on top of that, heating in general is quite expensive.<\/p>\n

When you put all of those aspects together, it\u2019s like the old world is screaming<\/em> out for Bitcoin mining. Obwexer agrees, \u201cIt\u2019s a no-brainer \u2014 even if you don\u2019t like or understand Bitcoin,\u201d he tells me, standing next to his shiny green booth and radiators keeping the Expo hall in Helsinki real toasty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Maximilian<\/figure>\n

Indeed, a large portion of his client base are \u201csolar guys\u201d \u2014 devoted climate change activists wanting to do something hands-on to de-fossilize their own energy use. While it\u2019s not exactly the first group you think about being interested in Bitcoin, \u201cThe economics just make sense,\u201d Obwexer tells me.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In a recent podcast interview<\/a> with Knut Svanholm and Luke de Wolf, two of the co-organizers of BTCHel, Obwexer remarked that \u201cFinland is really at the forefront of bitcoin heating and bitcoin district heating\u201d:<\/p>\n

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\u201cEurope needs Bitcoin mining so badly<\/em>, with the high volatility in the electricity grids\u2026 we don\u2019t have to fear the politicians too much, because\u2026 they already wrote it down \u2014 they just don\u2019t see that they wrote Bitcoin mining everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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. \u201cIf you want a clean, rich, healthy society you need a lot of power.\u201d<\/p>\n

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via: Todd Moss, Eat More Electrons<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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 \u2014 which also changes their response time from minutes to seconds.<\/p>\n

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Meet 21energy next week at #BTCHEL<\/a> \u2013 the First Large-Scale Bitcoin Conference in the Nordics! \u26a1<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udccd Join us at our booth and meet our team
\ud83d\udd25 Learn how we transform electricity into warmth & Bitcoin
\ud83c\udfa4 Don\u2019t miss talks from Harald, Maximilian & Lukas on Bitcoin mining,\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/juBRMGWvWh<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2014 21energy (@21energy_com) August 7, 2025<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n