Would large scale Bitcoin mining deployment have prevented the power outages in Spain/Portugal? Short answer: "Yes" Before the outage hit, Spain was running its grid with very little of what's called "dispatchable spinning generation" (also known as inertia). The image below is a snapshot from 12.30pm local time, 5 minutes before the outage occurred. "Dispatchable spinning generation" means power plants, like gas or nuclear, that can quickly adjust their output to keep the grid stable. The name "spinning" refers to the turbines that traditional generation plants such as coal, gas, nuclear that use spinning turbines help with this. Traditional plants provide this with their spinning turbines, but renewables don't, making the grid more fragile if you don't have a way to very rapidly load-balance in the case of an outage. This likely contributed to the outage that hit Spain, Portugal, and parts of France, as the grid couldn't handle sudden disruptions well. We don't need to speculate what would have happened had they had wide-scale Bitcoin mining operations: Texas provides a blueprint of what would have happened: Bitcoin minings would have been instantly notified of the major outage, and within under a second would have adjusted their demand, stablizing the frequency of the grid by preventing a major demand-supply imbalance. Texas for context has the highest solar&wind penetration of any grid in US. On one recent day power from solar and wind was 76% of total Texas grid demand (canarymedia.com/articles/cle…), but Texas' (ERCOT) grid also has 3 GW of controllable load in the form of Bitcoin mining that it uses heavily in the case of outages or sudden unanticipated peak demand. What happened in Spain and Portugal is not an inherent risk of renewables, its what happens when the renewable energy transition is done in a partial way, without due considerable to load balancing. Batteries are part of the solution too. Bitcoin mining and Batteries have different unique advantages. Bitcoin mining has the advantage of being modular, and low cost to deploy. Bitcoin mining also keeps the cost of power low for retail users by reducing the expensive curtailment fees that grid operators would otherwise have had to pay solar and wind operators. We have the solutions right under our noses, let's start using them.