How Texas is becoming a Bitcoin mining hub

During the right time of year, the cost of power can often go negative overnight. Ercot wants to get rid of this and ultimately raise the price of power as negative power prices have consequences for all the middle men involved. In Texas there are lots of middle men, negative power means they might owe money instead of making money, they all want to be making money.

The general idea is that ERCOT give some guarantees to the miners including rate locks. The miners promise to use so much power and then get to buy the power at a bulk rate. Enough of these miners means that enough demand is put on the system that the nighttime rates never go negative. Long term goal of this is to keep money flowing to the oil and gas companies, the traditional power generators, as well as all the middlemen, regardless of how much green power is invested and built in Texas.

The issue of "too much power" on the grid is something that could be controlled by ERCOT. They could easily put some of the power generators into standby to keep the extra power off the grid.

As for the miners shutting off when demand goes up. They are only going to do that when the price of power goes above the threshold of them not making money off crypto. Since the rate of power in Texas changes moment to moment, and can easily be monitored this is a trivial thing for these miners to do.

Further, the cities and towns that want the miners to be in their town are giving huge tax breaks to these companies to set up shop. In one instance, the miners will end up paying less than a million dollars a year for 10 years, while they estimate they will generate a couple of billion during that same time and bringing well less than 100 jobs to the area.

Up to now, whenever there's been a big discharge, the suspected polluter would say, "Well, it was next to our pipeline, and it's the sort of stuff we have in our pipeline, and it happened when we were working on our pipeline, but there's no proof that it was us." And the Texas regulators would say, "Sounds good to us!"

Now outside eyes are watching, including government agencies downwind in New Mexico, and as the detection technology becomes more refined, it will be harder and harder for polluters to wriggle out of it.

That would make sense if the mining made you more money than the grid and you had excess power, but what would be the point of selling your juice to the grid if that is the case?

Seems to me like powering as many miners as you can with your supply of installed power would have to be the goal at all times and the grid would be your backup plan to keep them running if your onsite supply was lacking.

Not cheap. The people I know in Texas tell me that their electric bills have doubled or tripled since deregulation.

Not reliable. The biggest issue in the current Texas gubernatorial election isn't the economy or immigration or the environment. It's the failure of the power grid last year that led to the deaths of hundreds of people, and how the state has allowed the companies responsible for the failure do little or nothing to fix their problems.

And I guess XY = $14 billion but I haven't bothered to look the numbers up.