While true, mining seems more analogous to high frequency trading where the most profitable mining operations seek to eke out every single advantage they possibly can in the unit economics to maximize profit. If energy is an input and money/profit is the output, then the mining market would obviously seek out the cheapest energy, which happens to be wind and solar. Intuitively, it's far more profitable to operate ASIC farms on cheap land in the middle of Nevada powered by solar panels than operating a similarly sized network off of the coal sourced power grid in West Virginia. The former has somewhat high upfront cost, but basically zero marginal cost, and amounts to essentially free money in the long run. While there will always exist a small set of "retail" miners that don't care about the source as long as they make some profit, mining will probably converge towards some power-law distribution (just like every other financial market) where 80-90% of mining activity will be done by a small minority of big/rich institutional miners that explicitly seek out cheap (read: clean) energy.

Obviously this is only theory, and the devil is in the details, but the empirical results appear to corroborate that theory.

The IEA did a report on the Bitcoin footprint: https://www.iea.org/commentaries/bitcoin-energy-use-mined-th...

> Around 60% to 70% of bitcoin is currently mined in China, where more than two-thirds of electricity generation comes from coal. But bitcoin mining facilities are concentrated in remote areas of China with rich hydro or wind resources (cheap electricity), with about 80% of Chinese bitcoin mining occurring in hydro-rich Sichuan province. These mining facilities may be absorbing overcapacity in some of these regions, using renewable energy that would otherwise be unused, given difficulties in matching these rich wind and hydro resources with demand centres on the coast.

> Electricity generation in other key bitcoin mining centres are also dominated by renewables, including Iceland (100%), Quebec (99.8%), British Columbia (98.4%), Norway (98%), and Georgia (81%). Globally, one analysis estimates that the bitcoin is powered by at least 74% renewable electricity as of June 2019. Another analysis of data from 93 mining facilities (representing 1.7 GW, or about a third of global mining capacity) estimates that 76% of the identified energy mix includes renewables.

Another report, https://coinshares.com/assets/resources/Research/bitcoin-min...:

> Furthermore, we show that Bitcoin mining is mainly located in global regions where there are ample supplies of renewable electricity available. And finally, we calculate an estimate of the renewables penetration in the energy mix powering the Bitcoin mining network at 73%, making Bitcoin mining more renewables-driven than almost every other large-scale industry in the world. Our renewables estimate has marginally dropped since our last report, reflecting increased levels of mining in low-renewables regions such as Kazakhstan. However, we still caution that our location estimates likely have error margins of ±5% and should be considered within that context.

If you believe all this to be true, then you could reasonably conclude that Bitcoin stimulates the demand for cheap (read: clean) energy, and Elon Musk just took a big step towards perpetuating that stimulus.

A relevant tweet that blithely captures Elon Musk's calculus: https://twitter.com/NeerajKA/status/1358788953713836033