The Grid’s Best Friend Just Left the Building

Dear Subscriber,

As the line in the song Big Yellow Taxi goes "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone." Texas is about to find out just how true that is.

Because Texas just ran an experiment that nobody designed, and the results should raise the eyebrows of anyone who cares about grid reliability, no matter where you live.

For the last four years, Bitcoin miners have been the most flexible large load on the ERCOT grid. When temperatures hit record highs in August 2023, Riot Platforms and others curtailed their power usage by more than 95% during peak demand, stabilizing the grid as they did so. ERCOT didn’t have to ask twice. The miners powered down in seconds, and stayed off for over 120 hours throughout August, often ramping up and down consumption to the precise level needed by ERCOT for grid stability in extreme conditions. There were no blackouts, and no emergency, just Bitcoin mining doing what only Bitcoin mining can do.

That wasn’t an anomaly. During 2022’s winter storms, Texas-based miners curtailed power consumption by 98-99%. In ERCOT’s classification, Bitcoin miners are Controllable Load Resources. They can cycle consumption on and off in less than a minute and ramp from zero to hundreds of megawatts over very short timeframes.

This matters because during these same four years, Texas renewables expanded significantly. Solar alone nearly quadrupled, going from about 4% in 2021 to ~12.8% in 2025.

More renewables means more intermittency. More intermittency means the grid needs more flexible demand. Bitcoin miners filled that role. When the wind blew and the sun shone, they absorbed surplus energy. When the grid got tight, they powered down. The network kept running and the lights stayed on…

Now they’re leaving. Here’s what that means for Texas, and for how the world views Bitcoin mining.