Core Weave chief strategy officer and former energy trader Brannin McBee joins the show to talk about the grid meltdown in Texas and the impact of renewables on the grid. In this episode:

Brannin's history in energy trading and energy analytics
How his firm survived a 95% collapse in the price of natural gas – and how that presaged his work in the crypto space
How Brannin's firm Core Weave alternates between mining ETH and monetizing GPUs through high-performance compute
How wholesale power trading works – and how it provides valuable informational signals to the grid
How the US grid is arranged – and how the energy mix has changed in the last decade
How coal has been marginalized in the last decade through natural gas and renewables
Why energy is not globally fungible
Why forecasting wind is so difficult – and how that complicates including wind into the grid
How renewables trade off reliability against carbon impact
How increasing the share of wind and solar destabilizing the grid
Why increasing units of wind requires new units of gas on the grid
The confluence of causes behind the Texas grid failure last week
How Core Weave selected their location on the grid – and how they took political risk into account
How much energy Bitcoin consumes – and where that stands relative to the energy consumption of the US
How flaring natural gas to mine Bitcoin works – and whether it's economical
Does Bitcoin work as a load balancer for grids?
Can you compare Bitcoin's footprint to that of entire countries?

Brannin McBee (Core Weave) on Greening the Grid, the Texas Meltdown, and Bitcoin Mining (EP.183)

Powered by Wave AI