Everybody knows that solar power is the most efficient way to generate electricity – and the most affordable. But how do you balance surplus solar with peak demand at night, when the sun isn’t shining? You need storage solutions, and that’s the problem. Energy storage is costly and inefficient. Even the latest battery packs have a limited cycle life, and green hydrogen only makes sense at the Gigawatt scale.

Until now, we’ve been buying and selling our excess energy to and from our neighbours on the nascent ‘energy internet’, but that doesn’t work when everyone has more than they need at the same time, and even the utilities don’t want it. Imagine if there was way to turn surplus daytime solar power into digital data, and back again, as often as you like, lossless and error free!

Well there is, and anyone can do it, at any scale. With bitcoin batteries, you simply generate bitcoins when the sun shines, and buy the power you need when it doesn’t. And if your grid provider accepts bitcoin as payment, it’s a seamless exercise. It’s way better than degrading your lithium battery with every charge cycle, or throwing away free energy from the sun.

That’s the beauty of a digital asset that can be created electronically with just electricity as input, and an internet connection of course. Digital storage is 100% efficient, and there’s no data loss, ever. Cryptocurrencies can be volatile, but bitcoin has established itself as the benchmark, which is why everyone uses it. Dispatching electricity over power lines is costly and difficult, but bitcoin can easily be sent from one part of the planet, where the sun is shining, to another, where it isn’t – and back again, when the sunshine has shifted.

Bitcoin batteries. It’s the new way to power – and finance – the energy internet.