Technology

Texas has also become a hotbed for bitcoin mining, adding to electricity demand, as the state’s deregulated power market and abundance of cheap natural gas became attractive to the energy-intensive sector.

Hmm.

That actually might make a lot of sense.

So, if Texas has inexpensive electricity most of the time, but also has occasional high price spikes...bitcoin mining is something where you do not need power now. Sure, you're losing money on your hardware and space if it's not running, but my guess is that bitcoin miners probably can do just fine shutting their systems down when prices rise above a certain point. That would tend to smooth out electricity prices.

I'd been trying to think of electricity users that could defer usage and use a lot of electricity, which are something that you want if you have wildly-varying demand and want to smooth it out, and I suppose that coin mining is actually probably a pretty good example.