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Texas paid bitcoin miner more than $31 million to cut energy usage during heat wave
(www.cbsnews.com)
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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It probably falls under a general policy where they compensate big industrial users if they shut down to save the grid, think like a factory shutting down for the day. It would make sense in those instances, but for crypto mining it's just wasteful.
That makes sense, but if that's the case, ERCOT needs to adjust its rates for that plan. They need to increase the cost of power and decrease the reward for discontinuing their use.
Miners should be pushed toward a plan with highly variable power costs. They should have the very lowest rates when power is plentiful, but the highest rates when it is scarce. They are ideal candidates for this kind of "demand shaping".
Yeah, a compensation plan should basically compensate a user for their fixed costs involved in shutting down (wages, etc), and not things like opportunity cost (the products you would've otherwise been able to produce and sell).
Thing is, you can't tailor different rates per customer, so a crypto miner is probably always going to be ahead, because they basically have no running costs besides electricity. The only other cost is basically the cost of acquiring the ASICs and having a security guard on site.
You certainly can establish different rate plans for your customers to choose from. You don't need a fixed cost per kWh. You could offer discounts for off-peak consumption, and surcharges for on-peak. You could establish reliability tiers, where you get a discount in exchange for being ready to shut down consumption when needed. The lower the tier you select, the cheaper your power, but the more you have to shut down.