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Playing [Texas’s] energy market has become more profitable than mining bitcoin
(www.economist.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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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