The main reason coin miners went to Texas was because of the wacky market dynamics of the grid there. They can actually make money by doing voluntary ‘curtailing’ of use when the grid is over utilized because of the wacky way the market is setup. There’s even been some more recent analysis of the freeze outage that points to it being specifically a market failure. Essentially the economics of making electricity for profit stopped working due to the spot pricing mechanics during the start of the freeze.

I’ll try to find an article to post later.

e:

this one is just a detailed overview of things:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629621001997

a few interesting quotes:

One reason gas producers lost power is that many of them intentionally sign up for interruptible power contracts as a way to reduce their electricity bills. Furthermore, a significant number of them did not fill out a short form requesting that they be identified as critical infrastructure, compounding the problem. Electricity providers unwittingly shut power off to some gas production and processing facilities, which reduced gas pressure further, thereby forcing more generating capacity offline when fuel was unavailable for gas-fired electricity plants. According to ERCOT, more than 9 GW of outages, about 20% of the total and enough for 1.8 million homes, resulted from insufficient gas supplies reaching power plants

During the freeze, Griddy Energy was in the news for passing on wholesale prices to customers, which led to thousands of Texans facing extreme power bills, some in excess of $10,000. Meanwhile, many gas providers have announced increased profits, revenues, share buybacks and increased dividends based on the strength of bumper sales of natural gas at very high prices during the 5-day storm

Up until the price cap was set, prices on February 15th had only risen to $1200 which the PUC judged as inconsistent with what was needed given that nearly 50 GW of power were offline. However, many producers had trouble reacting to these price incentives given that their operations were not adequately weatherized and gas supplies were curtailed. In other words, those power plants were not available at any price. At $9000/MWh, electricity retailers were concerned they would be forced to pay more for electricity that was available and that the high prices were sustained for far too long [44]. In previous periods of scarcity, high prices remained in place for a few hours, with 16.75 h the previous maximum in 2011 [45].

ERCOT stopped shedding load from the grid by 11:55 pm on February 17th, but kept in place the pricing order until the 19th. That led Potomac Economics, the PUC’s Independent Market Monitor, to issue a letter that said the pricing order had remained in effect for 32 h longer than it should have, leading initially to an estimated $16 billion in excessive charges to electricity retailers during that period, out of some $47 billion that was charged during the load shed event

another report put together by UT Austin: https://energy.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/UTAustin (2021) EventsFebruary2021TexasBlackout 20210714.pdf

It gets pretty interesting starting on page 57 “Electricity and Natural Gas Financial Flows and Prices”

some interesting quotes:

The value of the Real-Time Reserve Price Adders is based on the Operating Reserve Demand Curve (ORDC). Via the ORDC, once reserves fall below 2,300 MW, wholesale real time prices increase rapidly to the system-wide offer cap, currently $9,000/MWh. These adders largely explain the rapid swings in real-time wholesale electricity prices, from values below $1,000/MWh to the cap, from February 12-15.

Real-Time Reserve Price Adders only include data from “in-market” conditions and do not include “out-of-market” actions98 that might impact in-market conditions

According to current market protocols, if ERCOT initiates blackouts such that reserves appear high and recalls or cancels other out-of-market actions, price formation is once again based on supply and demand, even if demand is artificially lower due to active blackouts. This is why prices on February 15 were below $9,000/MWh for part of the day.

Because of the extreme demand for natural gas and constraints in natural gas supply, the price of natural gas was also much higher than normal during the February event. At one point, daily gas price averages at the LCAP-indexed hub were trading near $400/MMBTU. Tom Hancock, COO of Garland Power and Light, testified that he received a quote for natural gas at $1,100/MMBtu.

So that last one is kinda the smoking gun for my theory that gas-generators/producers likely decided not to ‘run in the red’ when the gas spot price exceeded the ERCOT price cap.

1 Million British Thermal Units = 1 MMBTU

Wiki says this is the conversion factor: 1,000 Btu/h is approximately 0.2931 kW

So clearly it wouldn’t fit with Capitalist logic to run a gas power plant when the gas price is so high compared to the ERCOT price. Unfortunately, I haven’t found direct evidence that this specifically occurred. But the entire ‘market incentives’ logic here seems to dictate that it very likely happened. It’s just that hardly anyone involved in the Texas energy market is very likely to admit to making that specific calculation during the winter storm.