This was a cute one, kind of delayed, taking ages to get through submission apparently

Most people think of electricity (or “energy” more broadly) as a static resource, at civilization’s disposal and always available at the literal flick of a switch. That’s true for gasoline in a car tank, liquid and stable when unused. Electricity, rather, is a constant flow where the push of a button either redirects it from elsewhere or informs the generators or reactors to produce more, or idly spinning back-up turbines to re-engage.

Some countries, like my home Iceland, use aluminum smelters as this electrical grid backstop, a rapacious consumer that could use more or less electricity to run the Hall-Héroult process—dissolving aluminum oxide in molten cryolite—faster or slower. Some four-fifths of all electricity generated in the (electrically-isolated) island country is used for metal production, filling the gap between renewable production (dispatchable hydro and constant geothermal) and variable demand, always able to give back power to the grid when necessary.

While some media outlets have pointed to Texas having “nearly 10 times as much battery capacity on the grid” now compared to the devastating storm five years ago, the missing component is the arrival of Bitcoin miners, able and willing to shut off on short notice; from the grid’s point of view, miners are functionally the same as massive, spread-out batteries. In the last four years or so, the US’s role in global Bitcoin mining has increased considerably, fueled in part by the China exodus and accommodating policies in, for example, Texas and Tennessee.

The hashrate—the amount of computing power operating on the Bitcoin blockchain at any given time—dropped by about a third in recent days, explained largely by the hundreds of etahash (a measure of Bitcoin mining output) of Bitcoin mining capacity participating in such demand-response programs. Seeing the hashrate estimator on my home-miner device show hashrate around 650 EH/s rather than 1,150 EH/s a few days before was stunning and illustrative: Every bit of electricity that previously powered the Bitcoin network was instead redirected to power space heaters and light and urgently needed additional machinery in storm-affected areas.

"Wins all around: The remaining miners on the Bitcoin network temporarily earn higher rewards from less competition (though blocks came in somewhat slower), the miners receive lucrative curtailment credits, and consumers have more electricity at their disposal.""Wins all around: The remaining miners on the Bitcoin network temporarily earn higher rewards from less competition (though blocks came in somewhat slower), the miners receive lucrative curtailment credits, and consumers have more electricity at their disposal."

picked up by ZH, and @siggy47 somehow from vacation, knows more about this being published than me. #1434145