That's very misleading.

The money they "make" from curtailment is not a payment made to Riot for curtailing power usage. Rather, it's effectively a discount on their power bills. What's really happening is Riot is getting discounted electricity because unlike other power users, they're willing to shut off when electricity demand is really high; no-one is going to cut you a check worth more than your power bill simply for turning off your miners. Riot is still spending a substantial net amount of money on power.

It's likely that the $8.6m number in that article is nonsense, based on some misunderstanding of Riot's business figures. Eg that might simply be the raw amount of Bitcoin Riot happened to sell that month. Or it might be the profit margin they made that month.

By acting as “dimmer switches”, mines offer ercot flexibility at a price that no one else can match, says Lee Bratcher of the Texas Blockchain Council, an advocacy group. Riot reckons the industry is being unfairly targeted and that replacing mines with batteries would cost the state even more.

That is not how it works. It is not something that you can use, just to put miners/auditors in a compromised position in the first place. They curtail power so that people will NOT frown at miners/auditors. They will give the power back to consumers as an act of goodwill. They are spinning this idea into the darkness to make it look like that it is profitable. Miners/Auditors are not power plants they cannot control how much power they will curtail. The only thing that they can control is cutting back on electric power consumption during peak hours and when electricity supply is too thin.

Not sure if you are from Texas or not and I would have to lean towards you aren't due to the title. When the freeze of 2021 happened and the grid almost failed one of the critical issues that was discovered was that Texas needed to increase its baseload power supply. There are not a lot of quick and effective ways to do this except for BTC mining hence Texas courted BTC miners because the state has the power but it did not have the demand to make a ton of the power plants worth running all the time and turning them on/off properly takes a lot of time.

A common thing that people have said is well just build data centers but because of how this energy credit program works it isn't possible because data centers cannot be flipped on and off without damaging the chips. BTC mining was always going to be a temporary solution to the grid issue at hand.

Now going back to this article I have to laugh at this author's sad attempt to connect events with BTC mining. Hurricane Beryl is the first example used of the grid situation in Texas but guess what.... BTC miners didn't factor in at all because when trees fall onto power lines and cut the lines there just straight up is no power. Centerpoint was months and months behind on tree maintenance and BAM did it show.

With the argument of the ties to China... the big miners in Texas arent Chinese companies the are American companies a lot of the Chinese companies went to Kazakstan before moving on to other Southeast, Russian, and literally back to China locations.

Biggest Critique These numbers are from a year ago. August 2023 for what it is worth. Here are the numbers for 2023 as a whole taken Jan 4, 2024

Now when we factor in that Bitcoin has risen considerably this year to $60k those 6,626 BTC are worth $397,560 million ($397,560,000.00) which flips even the updated data on its head.

To sum everything up... This was a hit piece that uses old data and doesn't tell the full story. Rockdale where this article is written was a dying city after the steel mills closed and Riot is now its biggest employer. Revenue from the property taxes that they pay contributes a significant share of the money the school district gets. Oh and they have partnered with Texas State University to create a pathway for students to learn about serves/miners and pave the pathway to work for the company or others.

So they earn more fiat and mine less sats?

Archive link? I see the example they are citing is from a year ago. I guess it's safe to assume things haven't changed. I can't read the whole article, but is it safe to assume there's no mention of the benefits the miners are providing to the grid?

to my knowledge In Texas, the electricity market can experience high prices during peak demand or supply shortages. Curtailing electricity essentially reducing or shutting down operations during these peak times can sometimes be financially beneficial.