Stranded Energy

Stranded energy is electricity that exists, or could be produced, but has no economical way to reach a buyer. The power is real; the market for it is not. Common forms:

• Remote generation - a hydro dam or geothermal field far from any city, with no transmission line big enough to carry the power to demand.
• Curtailed renewables - wind or solar curtailed because generation outran local demand or transmission capacity.
• Flared and vented gas - methane at oil wells with no pipeline, burned off (or released) as waste. See methane mitigation mining.
• Off-peak baseload - nuclear or other plants that cannot ramp down cheaply, producing power overnight that nobody is awake to use.

In every case the defining feature is the same: nobody is bidding for the energy, so it is nearly free, and often it is simply wasted.

Why this is the center of Bitcoin's energy story

A Bitcoin miner is the only large electricity buyer that is simultaneously location-agnostic (it needs power and an internet connection, nothing else), interruptible in seconds, and indifferent to when the power arrives. Those three properties make it the natural buyer for stranded energy - it can set up at the dam, the flare stack, or the end of the congested transmission line, and run on electrons no one else can use.

This is not because miners are environmentalists. Stranded electrons are the cheapest electrons on earth, and mining margins are thin, so the incentive points straight at wasted power with no virtue required. It is also the honest core of the "Bitcoin uses wasted energy" claim - true at the margin, though not true of every operation, and worth stating precisely rather than as a blanket defense.

See the Bitcoin and Energy rabbit hole for the full treatment, including where the claim holds and where it does not.