‘The Energy Bit’ Interview Josh Riddett
17th May 2020 
Josh Riddett
After meeting at Glasgow All Energy event in May ‘The Energy Bit’ caught up with our CEO Josh Riddett to discuss all the ins and outs of crypto mining and how it can be the saviour of the renewable energy industry.
Q: Could you briefly explain your business model and its benefits?
A: We’ve got a couple of different benefits for our clients. Most obvious is the fact that we manufacture some of the most powerful mining equipment on the planet. By giving our clients GPU mining equipment, they end up with a lot of flexibility, versatility, and hardware that has a much longer life cycle than typical ASIC’s or others.
So our hardware has a much longer life cycle, with many more coins available to mine, while using much less power in the process. This results in a higher yield, higher returns, and less risk. That’s fundamentally the advantages of the equipment that we make, and that’s what makes them so awesome.
Q: Can you give an overview of how the machines that you produce help the crypto businesses? Are they widely used?
A: Yes, for any proof-of-work blockchain transactions to move, there needs to be mining, which ultimately is just the process of verifying transactions.
Over 600 of the coins that exist today require this type of proof of work to demonstrate that the transactions have correctly happened. So, in effect, that is what the machines do; and as a thank you for providing that voluntary service, you get paid a small sum.
If your business is a blockchain coin that needs this, then the value is that your transactions now get verified and your network can grow. If you’re a miner that owns our equipment, the benefit for you is simply financial, as you’re able to earn tokens for supporting these networks with your machines.
Q: Do you offer renewable energy integration plans (using solar/wind power directly to power the machines) with your consultancy?
A: Most of our clients at this point are pulling from the grid simply because that’s the easiest way to do it.
However, as the markets are now changing in the renewable energy world, it’s getting very difficult for renewable energy installations to receive the same government tariffs that they used to, which classically supported their industry. We’re now seeing them desperately move towards new financial mechanisms. Our proposal is to use cryptocurrency mining to enable those companies to have a massive increase in their pence per kilowatt.
Our proposal is to use cryptocurrency mining to enable those companies to have a massive increase in their pence per kilowatt.
“If you have a solar or wind farm, you typically get a fixed pence per kilowatt for every unit of power that you sell back to the grid. They’re usually very low and they’ve been falling year on year, and subsequently in the UK, they got removed for new projects. So from this point forward in the UK, it becomes exceptionally difficult to make a working financial model for these new businesses as there’s just simply not the revenue stream there once was.”
Our proposition at the moment to these types of facilities is: instead of selling all of your power to the grid, you could allocate a proportion specifically for crypto mining. The revenue generated from that is vastly higher than what was previously achieved – sometimes even as much as 10 times more. It then generates a new financial incentive to create new renewable energy sites moving forward.
A lot of people think that crypto mining is bad because it uses lots of power, and it’s awful for the environment. The truth of it is, all the governments around the world say that they want to save the planet, but no one’s really prepared to pay for it. However, with something like crypto, the financials are so strong that it genuinely enables an independent of government financial mechanism to make new green energy sites available to be built that otherwise would have never been built. So actually when people think crypto is terrible for the environment, they couldn’t be further from the truth. The vast majority of large-scale crypto infrastructure is on renewable energy, and that increases demand for those sectors. I see crypto and renewable energy having a fantastic symbiotic relationship moving forward.
