Bitcoin as a Battery

Well, call any anthropogenic CO2 amount in the atmosphere "battery" then...

A bit nonsensical imho. A battery by definition has to be able to produce the same type of energy that was put into it.

While correlating crypto with something random every week (Easter bunnies next Sunday?) can be marginally interesting, this instance makes no sense. We can't extract electricity from aluminum or Satoshis, we can buy it though, but that's outside of the battery scope.

At first I thought the author makes fun of Bitcoin fanatics, but it appears he's actually serious? This is just insane.

It is not a battery in the physical sense because it does not store energy. What it does is, it allows you to transfer the economic utility of cheap local energy to regions where energy is more in demand. Although, as the article itself highlights, this could also be done more efficiently with aluminum smelting, and other processes that are energy intensive but don't require much infrastructure.

From a purely financial point of view I suspect maintaining a bitcoin mining operation in remote areas is harder and requires more frequent upgrades than if you were doing a more traditional manufacturing process.