Subsidized energy can be cheap or even free, and it's hard to compete with free. For-profit Bitcoin miners are in an intense competition to find the cheapest energy. Anyone who can steal their energy or get someone else to pay for it via subsidies will win there, but only until the free lunch ends. Energy free lunches are ending all over the world now; nobody wants to build a coal plant in order to give away the energy to bitcoin miners so they can retire in Switzerland.
And that's why the Chinese authorities kicked out all the bitcoin miners a couple months after that, dropping the bitcoin hashrate by more than half. It's on its way back up, but it hasn't fully recovered.
By contrast, especially in tropical regions, you can build a solar or wind power plant to mine bitcoin profitably without finding someone else to fob the bill off on. In much of the world, solar energy is now less than half the cost of fossil-fuel energy, though not in cloudy polar regions like Germany, the Netherlands, or the UK. There's a new record-low PPA price every few months, and it's always solar; https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/08/saudi-arabias-second-... this April seems to be the latest, at US$0.0104/kWh, which is about a quarter of what coal energy usually costs.
That's why the Navajo Generating Station has been demolished, Peabody Coal has gone bankrupt and may do so again, and for the first time in human history, outside of PRC, more coal generating capacity was shut down than was built last year. This year that'll probably be true worldwide. Coal (and nuclear, and oil) just can't compete economically with solar anymore, even in temperate regions. And, consequently, neither can Bitcoin miners who are paying the cost of using coal. Fortunately for them, shipping their server racks to a more profitable region is a lot cheaper than doing the same with a steel mill.
Hopefully this gives you a clearer picture of the whole political-economic environment in which Bitcoin mining is happening than just a few hard numbers, which are of course fundamental.
And that's why the Chinese authorities kicked out all the bitcoin miners a couple months after that, dropping the bitcoin hashrate by more than half. It's on its way back up, but it hasn't fully recovered.
https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate
By contrast, especially in tropical regions, you can build a solar or wind power plant to mine bitcoin profitably without finding someone else to fob the bill off on. In much of the world, solar energy is now less than half the cost of fossil-fuel energy, though not in cloudy polar regions like Germany, the Netherlands, or the UK. There's a new record-low PPA price every few months, and it's always solar; https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/04/08/saudi-arabias-second-... this April seems to be the latest, at US$0.0104/kWh, which is about a quarter of what coal energy usually costs.
That's why the Navajo Generating Station has been demolished, Peabody Coal has gone bankrupt and may do so again, and for the first time in human history, outside of PRC, more coal generating capacity was shut down than was built last year. This year that'll probably be true worldwide. Coal (and nuclear, and oil) just can't compete economically with solar anymore, even in temperate regions. And, consequently, neither can Bitcoin miners who are paying the cost of using coal. Fortunately for them, shipping their server racks to a more profitable region is a lot cheaper than doing the same with a steel mill.
Hopefully this gives you a clearer picture of the whole political-economic environment in which Bitcoin mining is happening than just a few hard numbers, which are of course fundamental.