Prepaid Energy: How to Fix Your Mining Electricity Rate for Seven Years

Every miner knows their electricity rate is the whole game. Almost nobody fixes it. Prepaid Energy is the part of the OneMiners platform that turns a floating cost you argue about into a contracted number you stop thinking about — and at seven years it takes Nigeria to $0.0364/kWh.

Bitcoin mining revenue is decided by four things: Bitcoin's price, network difficulty, transaction fees and the block subsidy. A miner controls none of them. Hashprice, the industry's shorthand for revenue per unit of hashing power, is simply those four inputs combined, and at the time of writing it sits at $38.33 per PH/s per day according to Luxor's Hashrate Index.

Electricity is different. It is 75–85% of the ongoing cost of running a Bitcoin miner, and it is the one major variable with your signature on it. Prepaid Energy is the mechanism for signing.

First, the stakes: a floating rate is an unhedged position

A miner running on a variable rate is holding two exposures at once. Revenue floats with hashprice, and cost floats with the grid. Most people spend their attention on the first and none on the second, which is precisely backwards: the revenue side is out of your hands, and the cost side is not.

A drawdown in hashprice is loud and everyone sees it. A rate that is higher than it needed to be is silent, and it compounds every hour the machine is switched on. The industry currently has roughly 235 EH/s of hashing power sitting switched off, and the reason is almost never that the hardware stopped working.

Revenue is weather. Difficulty is arithmetic. Electricity is a contract you either signed well or you did not.

How Prepaid Energy actually works

You buy energy for one miner or many, for a term you choose, and the rate is discounted against the standard rate for that site. The discount is not negotiated and it is not a promotion — it is a fixed ladder applied to the online-ordered rate:

Which means you can compute your own rate before you speak to anyone:

Nigeria at seven years is $0.052 × 0.70 = $0.0364/kWh. Czechia is $0.095 × 0.70 = $0.0665. Run it on any row and it holds. A pricing model you can reproduce with a calculator is a pricing model you can check, which is the whole reason it is published this way rather than quoted on a call.

What it looks like once it is running

The feature is not just a checkout step. Prepaid balances are visible everywhere the platform talks about a machine:

• Workers page — each miner card shows remaining prepaid kWh and estimated days left, next to that machine's expected performance.
• Worker Details — a per-miner view of usage, remaining balance and a comparison against the standard rate, so you can see what the prepay is actually saving on that unit.
• Wallet — a Prepaid Energy Details modal breaks the same information down per miner without leaving the wallet.
• Energy History — a searchable ledger of every prepaid event: purchases, consumption and adjustments, with an auditable trail of who changed a balance and when.

That last one matters more than it sounds. A prepaid balance is capital you have already committed, and a balance you cannot audit is a balance you have to trust. This one is itemised.

Why a fixed rate changes which hardware is viable

A rate is not just a cost, it is a filter on your hardware options. The break-even relationship is simple enough to run in your head:

At today's $38.33 hashprice and a standard Nigeria rate of $0.052, hardware needs to be better than 30.7 J/TH to cover its electricity. Prepay for seven years at $0.0364 and that threshold moves out to 43.9 J/TH — which brings in machines built years ago that are switched off in most of the world.

The same logic runs in reverse at retail power. At $0.15/kWh you need better than 10.6 J/TH, which in practice is only the newest hydro flagship. That gap is the entire argument: efficiency widens the window, but a fixed cheap rate is what puts you inside it.

When prepaying is the wrong call

It is capital committed up front, and that has real costs worth stating plainly. Prepaying seven years of power on a machine you intend to resell in eighteen months is the wrong shape of commitment. Prepaying on hardware already close to its efficiency ceiling locks in a cheap rate for a unit that will be replaced before the term ends. And prepaid energy is spent capital — it buys electricity, not optionality.

The case is strongest where it is boring: a modern, efficient machine you intend to run for years, where the only question is what the power costs. That is exactly the case where a floating rate is doing you the most quiet damage.

Final thoughts

Hedging in mining usually means derivatives. Luxor runs a real hashprice forward market and it is genuinely useful to read, but it hedges revenue, requires a counterparty relationship and leaves your power bill floating. Prepaid Energy hedges the larger exposure, needs no trading account, and holds for years rather than a quarter.

It is arithmetic, not marketing. Take your machine's J/TH, take the rate you are paying now, and run the one formula in this article. If your power costs more than your break-even figure, the machine is not the problem.