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
Enron-ass character arc.
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.
Now if we could just make not mining cryptocurrency more profitable than mining cryptocurrency 100% of the time, that would be really good.
