Solar Mining: Turn Excess Solar Into Crypto

Why solar and mining work together

Mining hardware runs best when it runs continuously. Solar panels produce excess energy during the day, especially in sunnier climates. Instead of selling that energy back to your retailer at a fraction of the retail rate, you route it through a mining rig.

The economics shift from "is mining profitable?" to "is mining more profitable than my feed-in tariff?" In Australia, where feed-in rates sit around 2-5c/kWh and retail rates are 25-35c/kWh, the answer is almost always yes.

What you need

A solar system with excess daytime generation (most residential systems overproduce), a mining-capable CPU or GPU, and a way to monitor your energy flows. The hardware doesn't need to be expensive. A Ryzen 5 5600X draws 65W and can mine Monero profitably on solar. Even a Raspberry Pi running bandwidth-sharing apps earns a few dollars a month on under 10W.

The numbers

Take a typical 5kW residential solar system in Australia producing around 20kWh per day. If 15kWh is excess (you're not home during the day), that's enough to run a small mining fleet.

Beyond just mining

Mining is the most direct use of excess solar, but it's not the only one. Your hardware can simultaneously share bandwidth (Grass, Honeygain), rent GPU power (Vast.ai), or host decentralised nodes (Flux). Stacking these revenue streams on the same hardware maximises the return on your solar investment.

This is what MineSweepR calculates. Enter your hardware, toggle solar on, and see exactly what each revenue stream earns when your power cost is effectively zero.

Getting started

You don't need an expensive setup. Start small, measure your excess solar, and scale up if the numbers work. A single low-power CPU rig is a good starting point. If you don't have solar yet, even a portable panel can offset a single rig's power draw.