Mining is not needed to keep the grid reliable or smooth imbalances. You can achieve this by dispatching or cutting off the marginal generators needed to serve the load in real time (the marginal generators serving the load of these facilities are already quick response generators that don’t benefit from already being on and switching from mining facility to demand bursts elsewhere). They increase demand and necessarily move dispatch up the supply stack, increasing the marginal power price which sets the clearing price for all megawatts in the iso auctions and consequently the power prices for all customers. They also increase congestion by requiring more megawatts to flow increasing the congestion price component of the nodal LMPs (locational power prices).Here is how prices are set in an iso auction. This is from iso New England. But works the same way in all isos including ERCOT.
https://www.iso-ne.com/about/what-we-do/in-depth/how-resourc...
It doesn’t matter to me if the mining operations are running or not, but they’re not helping the grid. Citing a crypto company on this is comically biased.
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