This could be automated and enforced by a digital contract if the energy companies paid the miners in L-BTC as part of the request to shut down--contingent upon usage dropping for a given time the L-BTC gets moved into their wallet, then they can pile up those and batch convert L-BTC to BTC once a day/week on main chain.

antic

My nephew works for local power company - they have had talks with miners. 

One of the things lacking is a regulatory structure (I don't mean govt led necessarily, but common agreed framework). For example: The power company wants to be able to send alerts to miners that "power level 5 event, power down" and they want guarantees that miners will adhere.

For now, each power company is needing to negotiate one-by-one with miners. There needs to be a common organization / set of agreed terms that all adhere to.

However, the power companies DEFINITELY see the benefit  



freetx

bitcoin

Could large Bitcoin ETF investment cause a hard fork?

Bitman

They won’t see mining as an unnecessary expense when it’s stabilizing the power grids of their other invesrments.