Tech entrepreneur Stafford Masie recently announced they are working with Eskom on plans for a large-scale Bitcoin mining operation through a new venture called BitMach.

Despite the headlines, this has very little to do with Bitcoin’s price. It has everything to do with how modern power grids actually work.

South Africa’s energy challenge is often framed as a lack of generation. In reality, the constraints are increasingly on transmission, timing and predictability.

Renewable capacity is coming online faster than the grid can absorb it. The problem is that solar and wind don’t produce power on Eskom’s schedule. In many cases, electricity is generated when demand is low (daytime) or when transmission lines are already saturated. 

That newly generated power is effectively stranded, because you can’t store large amounts of electricity cheaply. If it’s not used in the moment, it’s wasted.

This is where Bitcoin mining enters the picture.

Most large industrial users are terrible for grid flexibility. Smelters, factories and processing plants take hours or days to ramp down safely.

Bitcoin miners can switch off almost instantly.

That makes them what energy engineers call a programmable load. They can be placed close to generation sources, absorb excess electricity when it’s available and disappear from the grid the moment households or businesses need that power back.

From Eskom’s perspective, this lets it use Bitcoin mining as a grid shock absorber.

The beauty of this is that Eskom doesn’t need to believe in Bitcoin to make this work. It only needs to see miners as power users. 

Similar models are already in play in places like Ethiopia and Kenya, where they monetise surplus power to generate foreign currency. In those cases, mining isn’t competing with households; it’s soaking up electricity that would otherwise be curtailed.

For Eskom, that’s revenue from power that previously had no customers, which signals a grid starting to shift from a one-way pipe into a dynamic marketplace, where demand responds to supply in real time.

That matters for independent power producers, financiers and anyone building in energy, infrastructure or FinTech. A move like this could begin to open up the grid to numerous new business opportunities and initiatives.