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Before starting Stronghold, Beard worked as the Head of Energy at the private equity firm Apollo after previously starting his career in the energy sector working for Goldman Sachs. Beard went on to lay out the changing face of the crypto-mining industry and how miners have to consider energy demand on local power grids.
He noted that the shift to renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, is adding to the volatility seen in energy prices as “we're taking a base load source of power offline and replacing it with intermittent power, which is making it super cheap sometimes and super expensive other times.” “We need people to understand what we’re doing to the grid, which isn’t popular to talk about,” he noted.
“So I ended up going to look at it and these crazy Bitcoin miners were constantly calling the plant asking, ‘Hey, can we buy power from you?’” he said. “And because people tend not to do stuff that's money-losing, I modeled out myself what it would take to buy these machines to outfit the plant with a data center. So because of the interest of others, we did our own study and determined that we were better off just owning the machines instead of selling the power.
“The second best way is to spend a lot of new money to buy new machines that are more efficient,” he said. “Those are the only two options miners really have.” “I think if you are a Bitcoin miner and don’t own your own facilities, you are worried about things like printing more shares to get more cash to buy more machines,” he said. “For us, we are focused on creating a better product, like additional industrial applications, rather than just mining Bitcoin. But it’s hard, what we are doing is difficult.
“It was legal to leave these mounds there for 150 of those years, while the good coal was used to make power and steel,” he said. “So now we’ve got a couple billion tons of waste that is above the water table, while the coal mines have long been shuttered.”