Brazil cuts Bitcoin miner import duty to zero and companies may plug them into stranded solar next

On Feb. 20, Brazil’s foreign trade council published a technical resolution reducing import duties to zero for a narrow class of hardware: SHA256 Bitcoin miners exceeding 200 terahashes per second with energy efficiency below 20 joules per terahash.

Three days later, French state-owned energy giant Engie told Reuters it was considering installing Bitcoin miners at its 895-megawatt Assu Sol plant in northeast Brazil, the company’s largest solar facility globally, to monetize curtailed electricity and improve profitability.

The two developments landed within 72 hours of each other, and together they sketch a thesis most observers missed: Brazil is building a pressure valve for stranded renewable energy, and Bitcoin mining is the release mechanism.

This isn’t a story about Brazil “legalizing” mining or launching a national strategy. It’s about the quiet convergence of three forces: chronic curtailment, falling hardware cost barriers, and generator economics breaking.

Together, they create the conditions for incremental hashrate to flow toward a market nobody was watching.

The curtailment problem that Bitcoin miners can solve

Brazil’s wind industry curtailed roughly 32 terawatt-hours between October 2021 and September 2025, amounting to about 6 billion reais (roughly $1.2 billion) in lost revenue for wind farms.

Curtailment occurs when the grid can’t absorb the electricity being produced due to the wrong place, the wrong time, or insufficient transmission capacity. For renewable generators, curtailed megawatt-hours are destroyed value.

Wind and solar generated 24% of Brazil’s electricity in 2024, and in August 2025, that share hit 34% for the first time.

Grid operator ONS describes curtailment as a structural feature of systems with high shares of variable renewables, not a temporary friction.

As the renewables mix rises and transmission buildout lags, the mismatch grows. Generators need local, dispatchable demand that can absorb otherwise-wasted electrons and turn on or off quickly. Bitcoin mining fits that profile precisely.

Engie’s Assu Sol plant is located in Brazil’s northeast, a region with strong solar irradiance but transmission constraints.

The company told Reuters that mining or storage could make the facility more profitable by monetizing energy that would otherwise be curtailed, but emphasized this would take years to implement.

The signal matters because it’s coming from a state-owned European utility with no prior crypto exposure, framing mining purely as an industrial demand response tool.

What the tax change actually does to Bitcoin miners

Resolução GECEX 861, published Feb. 20, amends Brazil’s consolidated ex-tariff list to reduce import duty to zero for specific information technology goods.

Annex I adds a new line covering servers dedicated to cryptocurrency mining using the SHA256 algorithm with energy efficiency measured at 35 degrees Celsius, below 20 joules per terahash, and processing capacity above 200 terahashes per second.

The zero-percent duty remains in effect through Jan. 31, 2028.

This is not a blanket exemption for all mining hardware. The thresholds filter for top-tier ASICs. Older or less efficient models don’t qualify. The policy targets the hardware class that can actually compete at scale in a professional mining environment.

Brazil’s import tax structure is notoriously layered. Import duty is one component of the total landed cost, along with IPI, PIS/COFINS-Import, ICMS, and various fees. Trade logistics guides commonly cite total import burdens in the 40%-100% range.

Cutting import duty to zero removes one federal lever but doesn’t eliminate the full stack.

Nevertheless, Brazil reduced a key cost barrier for high-efficiency mining hardware, lowering payback periods, even though other taxes remain.

The break-even power price that makes this work

Mining profitability depends on three variables: hash price (revenue per terahash per second per day), hardware efficiency, and electricity cost.

As of Feb. 16, Hashrate Index reported a hash price of around $34.05 per petahash per second per day. Bitcoin traded near $64,000 on Feb. 23.

For a minimum-qualifying rig under Ex 040, with 200 terahashes per second at 20 joules per terahash, daily revenue equals roughly $6.81. Power consumption is 4.0 kilowatts. Daily energy use is 96 kilowatt-hours.

The break-even electricity price, ignoring capital expenditure and operating overhead, is about $0.071 per kilowatt-hour.

Converting to reais using the Feb. 23 exchange rate of roughly 5.17 reais per dollar, break-even sits around 370 reais per megawatt-hour. Retail business electricity prices in Brazil averaged 0.657 reais per kilowatt-hour in June 2025, which is far too high for mining.

However, wholesale spot prices often trade in the 250-450 reais per megawatt-hour range, and curtailed energy, by definition, has no better buyer.

If a generator can sell otherwise-lost megawatt-hours to a miner at or below its break-even cost, the generator recovers revenue that would otherwise be zero.

This is the mechanism: curtailment creates stranded value, mining converts stranded value into computation, and the ex-tariff drops hardware cost enough to tighten the arbitrage window.

What happens if the thesis plays out

If Brazil’s curtailment persists or grows, driven by continued renewables buildout outpacing transmission capacity, generators will face mounting revenue pressure.

Mining offers a bilateral PPA structure that requires no new transmission and can ramp within days of hardware delivery. The ex-tariff remains in effect through January 2028, creating a 24-month window for miners to lock in hardware cost certainty while testing curtailment economics.

Engie’s pilot framing suggests other utilities and independent power producers will evaluate similar options. If several large renewable projects announce colocation deals over the next 12 months, Brazil becomes a meaningful incremental hashrate destination.