Texas miners eased grid strain; AI conversions cut curtailable load

Bitcoin mining facilities in Texas reduced electricity use during record summer peaks on July 21 and 22, earning curtailment and demand-response payments that helped the Electric Reliability Council of Texas balance the grid. Growing numbers of former mining sites are converting to AI and leased data-center operations that include uptime guarantees, removing the option to curtail.

ERCOT logged preliminary peaks of about 87,403 megawatts on July 21 and 91,308 megawatts on July 22. The operator reported more than 20 gigawatts of headroom at the highest hour. ERCOT serves roughly 90% of Texas’s electric load, about 27 million customers over roughly 55,000 miles of transmission and more than 1,460 generation units. Regulators were told days after the peaks that demand could rise to roughly 175,000 megawatts within six years; ERCOT’s longer-term forecast is being revised.

Mining operators can stop computing rigs within minutes, freeing large blocks of capacity during tight afternoon hours. The daily revenue a miner earns per unit of hashing power, known as hashprice, recovered to about $32 per petahash from an early-June low near $27 and remains below last October’s roughly $49. Lower mining revenue lowers the opportunity cost of pausing operations, while curtailment payments and demand-response credits provide direct cash incentives.

Riot Platforms reported more than $31 million in curtailment and demand-response credits during the August 2023 heat wave, and disclosed $56.7 million in credits for 2025 and about $21 million for the first quarter of 2026. Riot’s filings show those payments reduced its net power cost to roughly 3.0 cents per kilowatt-hour in early 2026 and lowered its cash cost to mine a Bitcoin below the average market price for that quarter.

A facility that reduces load can collect payments by avoiding high wholesale prices, reselling power under fixed-price contracts, qualifying for ERCOT’s Load Resource programs and ancillary services, and lowering future transmission charges by cutting consumption during the four coincident-peak intervals used to allocate those charges. A study by a researcher at Texas A&M and Harvard found mining load tends to fall as electricity costs rise through wholesale-price and coincident-peak channels, but the response weakens when hashprice is higher; the study used contracted power near $30 per megawatt-hour as a representative figure.

Regulatory changes affect how much curtailable load will be available. Senate Bill 6, enacted in June 2025, requires new large transmission-voltage loads connecting after Dec. 31, 2025 to include curtailment protocols and directs ERCOT to competitively procure reductions from customers drawing 75 megawatts or more. The law also requires the Public Utility Commission of Texas to review and revise the coincident-peak methodology behind transmission charges by Dec. 31, 2026.

Operational and reliability factors have complicated reliance on miner curtailment. ERCOT recorded 26 “ride-through” events from January 2023 through September 2025 in which crypto facilities dropped more than 100 megawatts during voltage disturbances, with reductions ranging from 17% to 95% of pre-disturbance consumption. A failed transformer in west Texas in December 2022 knocked nearly 400 crypto mines and other facilities offline, creating a temporary surplus of almost 1,700 megawatts and forcing 112 megawatts of generation to shut down. ERCOT identified clusters that could each trip more than 5,000 megawatts during its 2026 screening.

Other resources provided flexibility during the July record. Batteries discharged a record 11,980 megawatts on July 22, and solar generation reached near 34,700 megawatts, helping cover the evening ramp when demand stayed high and solar output fell. Energy storage can inject energy to the grid on schedules set by the operator, a capability different from loads that merely reduce consumption.

More than 438,000 megawatts sat in ERCOT’s mid-2026 interconnection queue, with roughly 90% of that capacity from data centers. As mining sites convert to AI or high-performance computing tenants that require uptime commitments, the number of megawatts available for voluntary curtailment will decline. Network conditions have also shifted: Bitcoin network difficulty fell about 14% since January, and 2026 is on track for the first annual decline in the network’s history, a factor that affects mining economics and the practical availability of curtailable load.