When GREENTECH started some of its sites three or four years before this talk, it was buying gas at eight cents a cubic meter. By the summer of 2022, Jelmer ten Wolde told the room, he was paying one euro seventy. Ten Wolde, co-founder and CEO of GREENTECH Technologies AG, spoke at Mining Disrupt Miami 2022, recorded July 26–28, 2022, in a session hosted by Minerset. His case was that miners in expensive markets stay profitable by selling their heat and their flexibility, not by hunting for cheaper electricity.
Bitcoin was trading at $21,268 when the session was recorded. Ten Wolde described a Dutch operation built on the company's own patented immersion technology, with two live sites in the Netherlands and a district heating project in development in Finland. He said the technology lets miners operate anywhere, including urban areas of Western Europe that had been considered too expensive.
we have unlocked the secret to mine profitably in one of the most expensive energy markets in the world the netherlands
Jelmer ten Wolde · 1:00
Three energy problems for miners
Ten Wolde started from the point that energy is a miner's main operating cost. He listed three challenges. First, infrastructure: lead times on transformers and substations were, in his word, insane. Second, sustainability concerns were driving negative press, with a risk that they would be written into law. Third, large energy companies were starting to move into mining, which he said would raise difficulty and make the field more competitive.
From there he argued that cheap power alone is not a strategy. Operators have to weigh the price and volatility of energy markets and the imbalances between supply and demand across time and geography. The sun shines during the day, he noted, while most energy is needed in the evening. Most available sites are rural, because towns do not want a loud, air-cooled facility that creates no jobs.
He pointed to Germany and the Netherlands, where he said economic pressure was taking priority over sustainability and both countries were going back to coal during the energy crisis. To Americans in the audience complaining about gas prices, he said they did not know how bad it could get.
Efficiency across the whole operation
Ten Wolde framed the choice as adapt or die. Efficiency, in his telling, means the whole operation, not only the miners, and it matters to stakeholders inside and outside the company. He described downturns like the 2022 crypto winter as part of normal market cycles, not isolated events, and said fragile operations would not survive them. As in any business, he said, only the fittest survive, and in crypto that matters even more.
He gave three ways to raise efficiency. The first was to sell waste heat for cash.
as miners you're all focused on heat removal but the heat has a value and it's only half of the picture
Jelmer ten Wolde · 5:35
Buyers, he said, are everywhere: greenhouses, fish farms, breweries and laundry services. The second way was performance tuning, including overclocking, taking advantage of negative energy prices at certain times of day, and arbitrage between the energy inputs a site has available.
the applications are immense and the cherry on the cake these heat users create real jobs
Jelmer ten Wolde · 6:04
The third was more varied and more stable revenue. Because renewable sources are intermittent, he explained, grids pay operators to reduce or increase consumption to avoid overload and congestion. GREENTECH runs its miners on an overclocking profile and uses the extra kilowatts for this service, so there is no downtime. He called it a market worth billions in Western Europe, said similar markets exist in the U.S., and said it helps the transition to renewable energy.
The GreenBox
GREENTECH's flagship product is the GreenBox, which Ten Wolde introduced as the result of years of work by the company's engineers. He described it as a turnkey unit that sits between energy production and consumption and can connect to the electrical grid or gas resources. He said it can scale and move quickly and adjust to extreme conditions such as Finnish winters. The company also offers to take greenfield projects from scratch and to help clients find heat users and sites. He told the audience that anyone who could find a comparable solution should bring the numbers, and GREENTECH would run them and compare.
we are basically becoming an integrated link in the value chain instead of the end user
Jelmer ten Wolde · 9:32
Two live sites and a city in Finland
The first example was a farm in the Netherlands where GREENTECH overclocks S19j Pro 96 TH miners to an average of 160 TH. The site receives up to 40 euros per megawatt hour for load balancing, which he said cut its electricity price significantly.
our energy cost this month actually turned negative so we get money to mine
Jelmer ten Wolde · 10:39
The second was a greenhouse growing ornamental plants for IKEA, with a heat capacity of 200 cubic meters an hour. At a gas price of one euro seventy, Ten Wolde said, the heat was worth more than three million euros, which GREENTECH counts as a discount on its energy.
He closed by announcing a project in Finland, where GREENTECH was developing a district heating network of up to 30 megawatts for a city.
where we will power the city with sustainable heat from mining
Jelmer ten Wolde · 11:11
Then and now
Bitcoin was $21,268 on July 26, 2022, and $83,316 on October 12, 2026. The figures in this story are the ones Ten Wolde gave on stage in 2022 and have not been independently checked. The next Mining Disrupt is March 22 to 24, 2027, in Irving, Texas.