HELL’S GATE, Kenya — Two-and-a-half hours northwest of Nairobi by car, a small group of bitcoin miners set up shop at the site of an extinct volcano near Hell’s Gate National Park.

The mine, tucked away on the edge of Lake Naivasha, is operated by a startup called Gridless and consists of a single 500-kilowatt mobile container that, from the outside, looks like a small residential trailer.

Backed by Jack Dorsey’s Block, Gridless electrifies its machines with a mix of solar power and the stranded, wasted energy from a nearby geothermal site. It’s one of six mines run by the company in Kenya, Malawi and Zambia, powered by a mix of renewable inputs and working toward a broader mission of securing and decentralizing the bitcoin network.

“Most people think about bitcoin and the price of bitcoin and how they can save value in it or maybe spend it,” Gridless CEO Erik Hersman told CNBC during a visit to the Kenyan mine earlier this year. “That doesn’t happen without the bitcoin miners and us being globally distributed.”

Decentralization is a key feature of bitcoin, because it means the network isn’t controlled by any entity and can’t be shut down — even if a government disapproves.

Bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies are created through a process known as proof-of-work, in which miners around the world run high-powered computers that collectively validate transactions and simultaneously create new tokens. The process requires heaps of electricity, leading miners to seek out the cheapest sources of power.

While there are more than a dozen publicly traded miners, thousands of smaller, private operations are also competing to process transactions and get paid in new bitcoin. That includes individual miners in countries from Venezuela to Lebanon, and can involve a single mining rig in a kitchen or several hundred thousand of them in an industrial-grade datacenter.

Wherever the operation, bitcoin mining is a volatile business, because so much of the economics depends on the price of the cryptocurrency. Since losing 60% of its value in 2022, bitcoin has come roaring back, hitting a record above $73,000 in March, before pulling back a bit in recent weeks.

Much of the rally has been tied to the launch of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the U.S., as well as optimism surrounding the so-called halving that took place late Friday. That event occurs every four years and is designed to cut the reward for bitcoin miners in half, reducing the pace at which new bitcoins enter the market. Prior halving events have been followed by big run-ups in the cryptocurrency.

“Bitcoin is effectively unbreakable at this point,” said Adam Sullivan, CEO of Core Scientific, a bitcoin miner based in Texas. “Bitcoin is at a point where it is more profitable to continue supporting the network than to try and break it.”

Analysts at Deutsche Bank wrote in a note on April 18 that they expect the geography of crypto mining to shift after the halving as slimmer profit margins force miners to seek cheaper and more reliable forms of energy. The analysts wrote that the U.S. currently accounts for 40% of mining, with Russia at 20% and China at 15%.

“Latin America, Africa and the Middle East have caught the attention of crypto miners due to their lower energy costs,” they wrote.

Bitfarms, based in Toronto, is now operating in Argentina, while Marathon Digital, headquartered in Florida, has expanded into the United Arab Emirates and Paraguay.

Hersman, 48, was raised in Kenya and Sudan, where his parents were linguists. Before getting into bitcoin mining, he and his two co-founders, Philip Walton and Janet Maingi, spent years building internet connectivity infrastructure in rural and urban Africa.

In early 2022, the trio began brainstorming creative solutions for the divide between power generation and capacity, and the lack of access to electricity in Africa. They landed on the idea of bitcoin mining, which could potentially solve a big problem for renewable energy developers by taking their stranded power and spreading it to other parts of the continent. In Africa, 43% of the population, or roughly 600 million people, lack access to electricity.

Gridless now has eight full-time staffers and manages much of its operations remotely with its software.

Bitcoin gets a bad rap for the amount of energy it consumes, but it can also help unlock these trapped renewable sources of power. Miners are essentially energy buyers, and co-locating with renewables creates a financial incentive to bolster production.

“As often happens, you’ll have an overage of power during the day or even at night, and there’s nobody to soak that power up,” said Hersman. He said his company’s 50-kilowatt mining container can “take up whatever is extra throughout the day.”

“Within any second or minute, we are going up and down on a certain number of miners that are running,” Hersman said. “It might be down to 50 kilowatts, then up to 300 kilowatts, then down to 200 kilowatts, and then up to another level — and that will happen all day and all night.”

According to the International Energy Agency, in Africa’s rural areas, “where over 80% of the electricity-deprived live, mini-grids and stand-alone systems, mostly solar based, are the most viable solutions.”

Demand from bitcoin miners on these semi-stranded assets is making renewables in Africa economically viable. The power supplier benefits from selling energy that previously had been discarded, while the energy plants will sometimes lower costs for the customer. At one of the Gridless pilot sites in Kenya, the hydro plant dropped the price of power from 35 cents per kilowatt hour to 25 cents per kWh.

The buildout of capacity is also electrifying households.

Gridless says its sites have powered 1,200 houses in Zambia, 1,800 in Malawi and 5,000 in Kenya. The company’s mines also have delivered power for containerized cold storage for local farmers, battery charging stations for electric motorcycles and public WiFi points.

“It’s not really sexy,” Hersman said. “It’s a mining container made from a shipping container. It’s got a bunch of dumb machines sitting in it running the same equation over and over again, but it’s actually what secures the network.”

Nearly fifteen years into founding climate tech company Palmetto, Chris Kemper has seen plenty of changes across the clean energy industry, from early solar companies that are now public to Series A startups founded following the Inflation Reduction Act. 

Ensuring that the company continues to evolve in what Kemper calls “a complicated space” has been critical, especially with its goal of having a significant impact on mitigating climate change. 

But meeting that lofty challenge is increasingly not just a function of Kemper’s gained expertise in renewables and clean technology from stints at the UN and financing clean energy projects in developing countries before founding Palmetto, he told us recently. “You’ve got to deal with all sorts of stuff,” he said, rattling off several topics from international and domestic policies to the evolution of AI and building towards potentially becoming a public company. 

Building the proper sounding board is critical for any leader, especially as challenges and opportunities for business are emerging quicker than ever. 

For Kemper, his approach has been to build a network around him where “the world is kind of one degree away.” 

“When I’m looking at part of the business, trying to think outside of the box, or this is the problem I’m trying to solve, I think, okay, who has done that really well? What businesses have operated like that? Who is behind that? That’s my mentality, and then I figure out how do I get to that person,” he said. 

That has led Kemper to build out Palmetto’s advisory board, which includes former commissioner of the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Neil Chatterjee, neighborhood-focused social app Nextdoor co-founder Nirav Tolia, and Monica Williams, chief consulting officer at The Equity Project. 

Palmetto’s latest appointment is former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who in addition to holding that post during Bill Clinton’s presidency, was director of the National Economic Council for President Obama and chief economist of the World Bank. Kemper said Summers’ expertise will be crucial as the company looks to navigate the continually murky waters of economic policy moving forward. 

“We decided it would really help us to bring in an advisor who could really help us understand the lay of the land from a macro perspective,” Kemper said. “We were able to meet Larry and talk through how he could be a value add.” 

It also helped that Summers has a focus on climate mitigation, and Kemper said there was a shared belief around how that could have “a material impact on the macro economy in the longer term.”

“We are living in an era of rising energy prices and accelerating climate change. Decarbonization is not only vital for environmental sustainability but also for stabilizing global long-term economic growth,” Summers said in a statement.

Kemper said the company is looking to Summers for thoughts and updates on things like its 18- to 24-month rolling plan, how it should be managing treasury and corporate cash, how it should manage price points to consumers, and private placement of its paper, among other things.

Overall, Kemper looks to make it a point to stay in touch with his advisors at least once a month, and when there’s a particular focus on a particular topic, “we’re grabbing dinner and talking about it.”

Kemper is quick to acknowledge for some large companies the approach might be different, but he said he believes creating an advisory board of some sort is critical for all successful executives.

“Most industries are so interconnected and complex. You have to have some perspective on so many different topic sets,” he said.