Why 2026 is the Year Bitcoin Miners Become Global Energy Hubs
Bitcoin mining reached an important threshold in 2025, with nearly 53% of the network now powered by renewable energy sources, up from 37% in 2022, according to the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF).
It was a dramatic shift in Bitcoin’s carbon footprint, which has long been criticized for damaging the climate. CCAF said miners are switching to more sustainable and low-carbon energy, including hydro, solar and wind.
Analysts expect the trend to accelerate in 2026, as miners grapple with thinner profit margins following the 2024 halving that cut block rewards, record network competition and growing rivalry from AI data centers.
“[This year marked] a general turning of tide towards increasingly positive independent reports and media coverage on Bitcoin mining and energy,” Daniel Batten, a climate and Bitcoin analyst, told Cryptonews.
Batten, who has tracked Bitcoin mining’s energy mix, said the Cambridge University’s 2025 report recognizes that mining “helps stabilize grids and mitigate methane.”
Mitigation from methane alone offsets 5.5% of all Bitcoin network carbon emissions, according to CCAF. Scientists say methane gas has a global warming potential over 20 years that is 80x higher than that of carbon dioxide.
Bitcoin Miners Switch to Stranded Energy
Batten added that large, listed miners have started to buy energy assets outright rather than to rely on long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs).
For example, Marathon Digital Holdings (Mara) this year bought a wind farm, expanded into methane mitigation, and published a CDP, or carbon disclosure report, and a social responsibility report within six months.
“These things matter a lot to regulators and policymakers,” Batten said. “[They] make wider institutional adoption easier.”
Another major highlight of 2025 has been the rise of state-backed BTC mining. According to Batten, at least 10 countries are now mining Bitcoin directly or through government-linked entities using surplus electricity to build reserves without buying the cryptocurrency on the open market.
Bhutan has emerged as a prominent example, he said, using hydro-power to accumulate BTC. “[It’s] proving that mining is the most frictionless way to acquire a Bitcoin strategic reserve,” Batten said.
Bhutan holds anything from 6,000 BTC to over 11,000 BTC, depending on the analytics provider, making the tiny South Asian country one of the world’s largest sovereign holders of Bitcoin alongside the likes of the U.S.
Experts expect nation-state Bitcoin mining to continue in 2026, both in terms of the number of countries turning to mining and the scale of their operations, particularly in energy-rich emerging markets such as Ethiopia.
ASIC Arms Race Is Fading
Bitcoin’s hashrate soared above 1,000 exahashes per second in 2025, a sign of improved network security and also stronger competition among miners, according to Alejandro de La Torre, CEO and cofounder of DMND mining pool.
“2025 has been transformative for Bitcoin mining infrastructure,” de La Torre told Cryptonews in an interview.
He said one of the most important advances of 2025 was the maturation of next-generation mining protocols such as Stratum V2. The protocol allows individual miners, rather than pool operators, to select transactions that go into blocks, improving decentralization, security and efficiency.