Energy, AI, and Bitcoin: Three Threads
The intersection of building energy analytics, AI tooling, and Bitcoin's energy narrative — and why I think they're converging.
Three things I spend most of my time thinking about are starting to overlap in ways that feel important.
Buildings are data problems
Commercial buildings waste 30% of the energy they consume. Not because the technology to fix it doesn’t exist, but because the data is fragmented, unlabeled, and locked in proprietary systems. My day job is building tools that make this data legible — so engineers can actually find and fix the waste.
AI is making the tools cheaper
The models I used in my PhD research three years ago — BERT, topic modeling, custom NLP pipelines — required weeks of setup and domain expertise. Today, I can get 80% of the same results with an API call. That’s not hype; I’ve measured it. The implication is that smaller teams can tackle problems that used to require research labs.
Bitcoin forces honest energy accounting
Bitcoin mining is one of the few industries that pays the actual marginal cost of electricity, in real time, everywhere. That creates an economic signal that’s remarkably useful for understanding grid dynamics. The debate about whether Bitcoin “wastes” energy is the wrong frame — the better question is whether the energy accounting it forces will improve how we manage grids.
These three threads — legible building data, cheaper AI tooling, honest energy pricing — are what I’m building toward. More on each of these soon.