The 150 Terawatt-Hour Ghost
When I was in Lisbon recently, I watched Bastien Desteuque walk onto a stage and make a claim so large that the room went quiet.
Bastien is the director general of INBi, Institut National de Bitcoin (France’s national Bitcoin institute), and he’d flown in with a slide deck and a thesis that sounded impossible.
He said France, acting alone, could double the entire Bitcoin network’s hash rate using capacity that already exists today but sits idle, because nobody has figured out what to do with it until now. And no new construction was required. And this had the leaders of parties on the political left, center and right behind it.
I have not seen this covered anywhere in the English-language Bitcoin media and I’ll admit I was skeptical at first. So in this letter, I’ll walk you through how it works, because once you see it (like the arrow in the Fedex logo) you can’t unsee it.
The ghost in the grid
France runs 57 nuclear reactors. Together they produce about 70% of the country’s electricity, making France one of the cleanest grids on the planet. 95% of its electricity is low-carbon. That part is well known.
What’s less known is that in 2024 France exported a record 101.3 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity to its neighbors - roughly a fifth of everything it produced, shipped across borders to Germany, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and the UK.
And even after those exports, the French fleet runs at a capacity factor of about 70% - low by world standards. The same reactor technology in the United States runs at 92-93%.
INBi calculated that applying the American capacity factor to the French fleet, there was 138 TWh of energy sitting idle.
According to Cambridge’s mining industry report, the entire global Bitcoin network consumed 138 TWh - the exact same number.
That gap - 138 TWh of nuclear energy France could produce today, from existing reactors goes unproduced because nobody is there to buy it, and it would take very little additional cost to monetize it.
Why nuclear gets antsy sitting still
But there’s another reason to do something with it: safety.
Nuclear reactors don’t like being turned up and down. The process is called modulation, and it damages them, shortens their operating life, and costs money. INBi puts France’s 2024 losses at ~80 Million euros.
The fleet runs below its potential because there is not enough demand on the grid to absorb what the reactors could produce, so they modulate, and that modulation degrades the asset.
And it’s getting worse. France is planning to 3x its solar capacity, 2x its onshore wind, multiply offshore wind by 10x. Meanwhile, demand has stayed flat. That means nuclear power will get more and more used as a load balancer to variable renewable energy - something it was never designed to do. While the safety risk is being downplayed by the current Government, any nuclear safety engineer (and I happen to know one) will tell you that nuclear energy should never be used this way.
Where the politics gets interesting
This is where the story takes a turn I didn’t expect.
Last year, MARA, one of the largest Bitcoin mining companies in the world, moved to acquire a 64% stake in Exaion, a data-centre subsidiary of EDF, the state-owned company that operates France’s nuclear fleet. The original terms included a non-compete clause that would have fenced EDF off from commercial AI, cloud and Bitcoin mining outside the venture for 2 years. An American company had quietly parked itself at the door of the largest pool of idle low-carbon power in Europe, and it wanted the door to itself.
When the French political establishment realized what was happening, the deal stalled for months over one question: sovereignty. And the remarkable part is what they agreed on. Every political camp, from the far right to the far left, arrived at the same conclusion: France should be using its overcapacity for high-performance computing and Bitcoin mining, and should not hand that opportunity exclusively to a foreign company.
As Bastien Desteuque, who ran INBi’s lobbying through those six months, put it from the stage: “From the far right to the far left, apart from one party (the Green Party, the one that stayed silent), the others were saying: we have overcapacity, we should do Bitcoin mining, and not let the American do it.”
Bitcoin is the only technology I know of where the far right, the centre, and the far left of a country have all arrived at the same position. How often does that happen?
The energy trilemma (security, sustainability, affordability) gives every camp something they care about: the right sees energy security and sovereignty, the left sees cleaner power and lower prices, the centre sees an industry that can compete. Bitcoin mining delivers all three at once, and INBi framed it in each group’s language rather than asking them to adopt theirs.
The resolution was very French, and almost nobody has reported it. INBi lobbied against the clause, and a French mining consortium led by Sébastien Gouspillou put a 30 million euro counteroffer on the table to force the issue. When the State authorised the deal in February 2026, it imposed binding conditions. The non-compete clause was removed entirely. Telecoms billionaire Xavier Niel came in as the required French investor, and French interests now hold 5 of 8 board seats.
Read the shape of that outcome. MARA got its foothold, France’s idle nuclear power stays open for French Bitcoin miners to compete for, and France’s political class has now debated in public what that idle capacity is worth. The market is open.
Why what happens in France matters outside France
150 TWh is INBi’s tally for the full ghost - 138 from nuclear alone, plus curtailment from wind and solar, rising fast as new capacity comes online.
And France is just the largest example.
As we covered in Issue #49, in Sweden, Flexionics ASICs earn 58% of the revenue from grid stabilization services. The Swedish grid called on their facilities 11,247 times in one year, and the calls were to ramp up, absorbing surplus windpower that would otherwise have posed a damage risk to critical grid infrastructure.
In the Netherlands, Bert de Groot’s 2-megawatt mining containers have been providing grid balancing for over 5 years.
Two European countries with two different energy mixes reached the same conclusion: Bitcoin mining is the flexible demand their grids needed and didn’t have.
INBi is now working with the European Bitcoin Energy Association on a peer-reviewed paper, led by Dr Margot Paez from the Georgia Institute of Technology, measuring the modulation costs and the potential for Bitcoin mining to reduce them. That paper is expected before the end of 2026.
The data is coming. And as someone who’s spent the last 4 years tracking exactly this kind of evidence, I can tell you: once the data arrives in a peer-reviewed journal, the policy conversation changes.
A promise I owe you
In February I mentioned I’d just started coaching Bitcoiners who are building bridges to the next wave of adopters, and said I would tell you more in the coming weeks. I’m overdue! Actually, you’ve already met 3 of my clients.
Bastien who you’ve just read about is one. Bipin Patel from June’s $110 Billion Blindspot issue is another. And so is Ismael Dainehine from EverGive who has brought Bitcoin to 48,000 donors who’d never touched Bitcoin before.
None of the 3 changed because they got more advice. Bipin knew ASICs could do more than hash. Bastien knew France had idle nuclear. Ismael knew how to raise money at scale. What moved them ahead was collapsing the gap between knowing and acting, which is where the most capable get stuck. As Ismael put it: “A company is usually waiting for the founder to upgrade themselves first”.
This is why I coach peer groups. Bitcoin is a peer to peer network, and Bitcoiners do their best work connected to their peers. Ismael and Bipin for example have very different Bitcoin missions, yet they sat in the same group at the same time, and inspired each other.
In February I wrote that reaching Bitcoin’s early majority will require different messengers. These are the messengers.
If you’d like to be one of these messengers, the application form is here.
Top picks
Britannica recently refreshed its explainer on Bitcoin and the environment, leaning mostly on the 2025 Cambridge Digital Mining Industry Report.
It notes, among other things, that 52.4% of Bitcoin’s electricity is sourced from renewable or low-carbon sources, that Bitcoin mining supports projects which capture methane and provide demand support for renewable grids, and that some operations recycle mining heat, reducing its environmental impact.
Britannica had previously put out statements about Bitcoin mining that can be objectively classified as misinformation such as "more [Bitcoin] transactions boost the required computing power" (untrue: Bitcoin’s energy consumption comes from mining, not transactions).
Besides this update, the number of peer-reviewed scientific studies continues to rise. Most recently, a new Energy Economics study examining Bitcoin mining’s ability to soak up wasted renewable energy on regulated grids. The findings were quite significant:
"Compared with battery storage, hydrogen electrolysis, or transmission reinforcement, the co-investment is privately financed and operationally market-driven” and “...without requiring physical network upgrades or regulatory subsidy."
and
"Unlike battery storage, mining incurs no round-trip efficiency losses or cycle degradation; unlike hydrogen electrolysis, it requires no downstream offtake infrastructure."
In other words, no subsidy needed, no new grid infrastructure required and no performance degradation. Batteries by contrast do need a subsidy, often need new grid infrastructure and their performance does degrade.
Trailblazers
A farmer from Madeira has come up with an ingenious way to harness waste heat from Bitcoin mining. His story is brought to us by Joe Nakamoto, a Bitcoin filmmaker who visited Fred’s family farm 400m up a mountainside, where together with his partner Daniela he has been able to grow succulents, herbs, aloe vera and endemic Madeiran lavender despite the brutal Atlantic winters in the area.
He does so using a single miner that heats up an entire greenhouse, while also channeling its waste heat to dry harvested herbs and chillies and warm the worm beds for his vermiculture. On top of that, the miners lower the nighttime humidity, cutting the need for pesticides and thus making the farm’s produce, as he calls it, ‘certified organic’. And he does all this while stacking a Bitcoin treasury he hasn’t sold from since 2019.
Meanwhile, in Lisarow, beer and Bitcoin are making an unlikely pairing. The Hawkesbury Brewing Company has installed 16 Bitcoin mining computers that run only when their rooftop solar generates more electricity than the brewery needs. Why did they do this? Exporting the surplus energy to the grid wasn’t financially attractive, and battery storage was ruled out because of insurance concerns over storing electricity close to alcohol.
The result? Close to $2,000 earned monthly from the rigs, almost covering the brewery’s power bills, which means lower operating costs. This adds to the growing list of instances where Bitcoin’s waste heat is put to work, from heated greenhouses to homes warmed through the winter.
Lastly, on the bones of a 1979 sawmill beside Guyana’s Canje River, Bitcoin Timber is reviving a mill operation and turning it into a full loop: milling waste including sawdust, slabs and edgings is used as fuel to generate electricity that runs Bitcoin miners, and the heat the miners produce is channeled into kiln-drying the freshly cut lumber.
The team is targeting Q3 2026 for the miners and Q4 for the mill and kiln, so the full loop is still coming online. Like Kenji’s fishfarm/Bitcoin mining loop we covered in Issue 48, this looks like becoming another example of a Bitcoin backed circular economy.
Got an inspiring Bitcoin adoption story?
Let us know! Inspiring stories deserve to be shared. And they help adoption.