Bitcoin miners returned enough electricity to heat 1.5 million homes during the Texas snowstorm

After the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), an independent electricity supplier to more than 26 million Texas customers, introduced the Interim Voluntary Load Curtailment program for Bitcoin (BTC) miners and other similar large consumers, cryptocurrency miners have risen to the occasion.

The program, implemented “in times of low or declining [Physical Responsive Capability (PRC)] after the Non-Spinning Reserve Service is deployed, but before [Emergency Response Service (ERS)] have been deployed,” demonstrated success during winter storm ‘Elliott’ in Texas, according to ERCOT’s LFL analysis published Feb. 17.

Crush the numbers

As the report discovered, during the winter storm the large flexible load (LFL) of these consumers decreased significantly during times of high rates, and all 20 LFLs monitored “demonstrated a reduction in load to some extent,” returning up to 1,500 MW of energy to the Texas grid.

According to the calculations made by the Bitcoin advocacy group called Satoshi Action Fund, this amount of energy would have been enough to heat “over 1.5 million small homes or keep 300 large hospitals in full operation” during the polar vortex that plunged the state of Texas. down to minus degrees in December 2022.

On top of that, six of these large consumers “capped the load for the duration of the Elliott, regardless of market prices,” while “the remaining 14 LFLs behaved in a manner that suggested they were responding to real-time prices,” the report said.

Miners ready to commit

It is also important to note that Texas is home to a large number of Bitcoin miners who have been forced to relocate from China after the government banned Bitcoin mining in the country in June 2021, as part of the sweeping crackdown on anything that has crypto. , originating in 2013.

Notably, the Texas miners also stepped up in the summer of 2022 as they heeded the grid operator’s plea to consumers to reduce power consumption during high demand due to record high temperatures, with some miners, such as Riot Blockchain Inc., “significantly” profiting from halting operations.

Meanwhile, ERCOT has also conducted an analysis of how often the Temporary Voluntary Load Reduction Program would have been used if it had been in place in 2022, and it is estimated that it would have been in effect for about nine hours for the entire year.