A world first: the global database of wasted energy

An exclusive first look for Stacked readers at Every Last Joule - the world's largest open-source database of curtailed renewable energy and flared gas.

Many of you know that I am a part-time Bitcoin researcher through my work with DARI.

Today we are giving Stacked customers a first look at a new, as-yet-unreleased database and website that demonstrates two things at once: that the framing of Bitcoin's energy use as problematic is misguided, and just how valuable a large, flexible load can be to renewables when their generation is undervalued by the grid and its customers. Having a flexible buyer like Bitcoin could be a game-changer for renewable developers - if they take up the opportunity.

The Every Last Joule database is the world's largest open-source catalogue of wasted and curtailed renewable energy, drawn live from grid operators in 384 regions across 195 countries.

The headline finding is striking: at today's hashrate, the renewable energy currently thrown away - or never generated despite the capacity to do so - routinely matches and at peak hours significantly exceeds what the entire Bitcoin network consumes. The energy is already there. It is simply being wasted.

What is curtailment, really?

A wind turbine in Scotland spinning hard on a winter afternoon, paid to switch off because the transmission cables south to England are full. A solar farm in California, dialled back to a fraction of its output at noon because there is nowhere for the electricity to go. A hydroelectric reservoir in Sichuan opening its spillway gates in monsoon season, letting cubic kilometres of head water rush past the turbines because the powerhouse downstream cannot dispatch any more megawatts.

All three are the same thing. Curtailment: clean, paid-for, ready-to-use energy that the grid cannot absorb in the moment it is produced, and so deliberately discards.

It happens because the electricity grid was built around predictable, dispatchable power stations - coal, gas, nuclear, large hydro - that turn on when demand calls for them. Wind and solar do not work that way. They generate when the wind blows and when the sun shines, regardless of whether anyone needs the power right then. When supply runs ahead of demand and transmission, something has to give. In a well-designed market, prices crash and the most expensive plants shut off first. But when too much renewable capacity hits a constrained grid, the cheapest, cleanest electrons get switched off instead.

In Germany this routinely produces negative electricity prices - generators paying the grid to take their power. In Britain it produces eye-watering compensation bills paid by consumers to switch wind farms off. In California it produces the famous "duck curve": a residual demand profile so deformed by midday solar that gas plants now ramp up and down on schedules their engineers never designed for. Every one of these symptoms points at the same underlying problem. The grid does not have a buyer of last resort.

And it is growing fast

The deeper any country goes into the renewable transition, the more it curtails. The UK paid wind farms to shut down 8.3 TWh of generation in 2024, up from 1.9 TWh in 2019 - a more than four-fold rise in five years, with the single biggest jump (+91%) coming in the last year alone. The bill landed on consumers: around £1.5 billion in 2025, paid to switch wind off and gas on. Without reform, the National Energy System Operator warns that figure could reach £8 billion a year by 2030.

It is not a UK story. California's CAISO curtailed 3.4 TWh of wind and solar in 2024, up 7-fold from 2018. Germany's solar curtailment surged 97% to 1.4 TWh in 2024. Spain cut nearly a fifth of its wind generation in May 2025, three times more than a year earlier. Brazil dialled solar back by 20% last August. China's worst provinces sit above 30% curtailment for both wind and solar. Cyprus curtailed almost half of its large-scale solar in 2025.

Putting numbers on it

Until now, there has been no single place where this data lives. National reports are buried in regulator PDFs. ISO dispatch series are scattered across a dozen formats. The biggest curtailment numbers tend to surface as anecdotes in industry newsletters or quarterly investor presentations - never aggregated, never compared, never tracked through time.

Every Last Joule pulls dispatch data directly from system operators - EirGrid, AEMO, ONS Brazil, ENTSO-E, CAISO, ERCOT, Elexon, Transpower and dozens more - and reconstructs every grid's curtailment shape at hourly UTC resolution. Where a TSO publishes the figure directly, the dashboard uses the figure. Where it doesn't, it applies a 2024-anchored rate published by that jurisdiction's regulator. Every assumption is source-cited; every loader is reproducible from a clean build with one command.

Gas flaring is tracked separately. Eight basins - the Permian, both Siberias, southern Iraq, eastern Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Yamal - burn continuously, 24/7, regardless of grid demand. Folding them into the headline ratio would flatten the diurnal signal, so they sit as a continuous base-load footnote underneath the renewables figure.

Why this matters right now

For the past decade, the dominant criticism of Bitcoin mining has been its energy use. The number quoted is usually around 138 TWh per year - roughly Thailand's annual consumption. That number is real. What the critique has always missed is the shape of that load.

Bitcoin miners are the most flexible large-scale electricity buyer ever built. A miner can switch off in seconds when the grid needs the energy elsewhere, and switch back on the moment it doesn't. There is no warm-up time, no production schedule, no contractual minimum take. Pair a Bitcoin mine with a curtailed wind farm and you do not need to build storage, you do not need to build transmission, you do not need to wait for the duck-curve problem to be solved. You just need to point the otherwise-wasted electrons at a machine that earns when they flow and shuts off when they don't.

AI data centres - the load that is now overtaking Bitcoin in the energy conversation - cannot do this. Training runs and inference workloads need 24/7 stable power and tight uptime SLAs. They are the wrong customer for an over-supplied renewable grid. They will outbid renewables for firm base-load every time, and they will leave the curtailed joules untouched.

This is the shape of the next decade: more renewable capacity coming online, more curtailment as transmission and storage lag, and more competition for firm base-load from AI. The renewable operators who pair their assets with a flexible buyer of last resort capture revenue from joules they would otherwise have written off. The ones who don't, won't.

Open-source, methodology-cited, peer-reviewable. The code lives at github.com/honeybeesquad/every-last-joule-dashboard.

Stack accordingly. ⚡

Simon, Co-Founder

Stacked is New Zealand's Bitcoin-only exchange and non-custodial wallet platform. Financial Service Provider FSP1005773.

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