Sean McDonough
32 posts
@NWDSean
Oil & Gas vet turned Bitcoin miner, CEO @newwestdata. We own oil wells that generate profits by producing barrels and creating digital egress for stranded gas.
For data centres and miners on the grid, Winter Storm Fern was a stress test. Spoiler: most failed. The storm exposed a critical fragility in the grid: In the east, it broke the price model. In the west, it broke the uptime model. Here is the tale of two crises (and the one solution). 🧵👇 1: Eastern Price Shock 💸 In PJM, frozen gas lines met surging demand. Spot prices ripped as high as $4,000 per MWh. If you were grid-connected without a fixed hedge, your OpEx for the quarter was wiped out in 48 hours. Efficiency doesn't matter when power costs 80x your budget. 2: Western Availability Shock 🛑 Alberta (AESO) faced a different crisis. Cold + Generator failures = Grid Alerts. It wasn't about price. It was about survival. Miners and interruptible loads were forced to curtail to zero. 0% Uptime during the peak of the storm meant lost revenue. The Lesson: If you rely on the grid, and a storm hits, you either pay the surge pricing or you go dark. We insulated ourselves by vertically integrating. We own the well. We own the power. While others blew budgets or lost revenue, we operated at 100% capacity with fixed cost, sovereign uptime. In 2026, you can't hedge reliability with financial derivatives. You hedge it with infrastructure. #EnergySecurity #EnergyScarcity #WinterStormFern
Remember this the next time people gaslight you with anti data center crap. Speaking of gaslighting: Canada flares off 7 GW of natural gas as a waste product of mining each year- more power than all the LLM training clusters use combined. Let’s build data centers in Alberta.
We really have the best team in the biz - meet Dorn, our VP Operations, a 25+ year oil and gas veteran turned miner who is onsite near Grande Prairie where we're producing barrels of oil while using the natural gas to power bitcoin mining!
