On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price rockets, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August of 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.
Archive link: https://archive.md/O8Cz9
Strange how they get paid to turn off their power, but homeowners do not. Pretty sure power companies don’t pay market prices for solar buyback from homeowners either.
So much for “free market” electricity.
Homeowners aren’t signing contracts where they agree to use exactly 450MW of power at a constant rate 24/7 for the entire year. The problem with “Free market” utilities is that they are reliant on private sector contracts like this to fund expansion
From a business perspective, if the grid can handle the residential load 99.9% of the year, paying these businesses to cut usage during that other 0.1% of the time is a LOT cheaper than expanding their service to add one more decimal place of uptime that sits idle for the entire year
Cloud platforms like AWS/Google/Azure do something similar, where you can rent unused servers for pennies on the dollar with the expectation they can be reprovisioned by someone else on a seconds notice
