This article was written in collaboration with Magdalena Gronowska, a Bitcoiner who has 10 years of experience in energy and carbon markets. 
Original Article Found: https://braiins.com/blog/green-innovation-in-bitcoin-mining-recycling-asic-heat

Bitcoin mining is an energy intensive industry. Correspondingly, miners exude large quantities of heat as a byproduct of the hashing process, which conventionally has been vented into the atmosphere. Competitive mining companies are exploring different ways to recover and repurpose waste heat to create additional revenue streams and offset electricity costs.   

Heat recovery is a low-carbon technology that cuts across multiple sectors of the economy.  Low-grade heat — i.e. low-temperature heat expelled by miners — is required to heat homes and buildings and by certain manufacturing processes (such as in food and beverage production or pulp and paper manufacturing). The primary challenges are identifying effective ways to capture and transfer heat, along with sound economic use cases.

The re-use of waste heat offers environmental benefits — it offsets energy consumption and any associated carbon emissions. Even larger environmental benefits occur if clean electricity powering miners displaces heat generated from fossil fuels. Historically for example, coal, bunker fuel, propane, or natural gas have been used by the North American agricultural industry in heating systems.

Heat recovery applications are a compelling use case for Bitcoin mining in that they can be implemented within both centralized and decentralized mining applications. A large-scale mining installation coupled to a large heat load like a manufacturer, greenhouse, or district heating system could economically benefit in the same way that smaller distributed miners could provide space and water heating for residential and commercial uses.

Energy consumption represents the largest operating cost for mining operations (79% of operational expenses on average). This makes bitcoin mining one of the most energy price-sensitive industries in the world.

Large-scale mining facilities exist in the US, Canada, Iceland, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Russia, their specific locations largely determined by the holy grail of the mining industry: low electricity prices. A few particularly innovative miners, however, have found a way to share their power bills with other seemingly unrelated businesses.

In this article, we examine 5 mining projects that are helping reduce greenhouse gas emissions by repurposing the heat produced by their ASICs. These projects are important milestones for establishing the feasibility and economics of green Bitcoin mining.