Texas broke its all-time electricity demand record twice in two days last week. ERCOT served a preliminary 91,308 megawatts around 5 p.m. on July 22, one day after demand hit 87,403 megawatts and erased the 85,508-megawatt mark that had stood since Aug. 10, 2023.
Neither afternoon saw an appeal for energy conservation, and the system carried more than 20 gigawatts of headroom at the peak. Days later, the grid operator told regulators that demand could roughly double within six years to 175,000 megawatts, while a long-term forecast that had reached about 367,790 megawatts by 2032 was being reworked after regulators deemed it flawed.
Bitcoin mining is one of the resources Texas has folded into that comfort. The Energy Information Administration describes the voluntary curtailment agreements ERCOT has built with large customers as primarily crypto mining facilities, alongside some data centers and industrial plants.
What those agreements deliver on any given afternoon gets priced in a market with no interest in a Texas heat wave. Hashprice, the daily revenue a miner earns from a petahash per second of computing power, has recovered to roughly $32 from a 2026 low of $27.20 in early June, and it remains about 35% below the $49.40 recorded last October.
Weak mining revenue makes a shutdown cheap, since the Bitcoin a miner forgoes during those hours is worth less. A price recovery works the other way, lifting the electricity price an operator needs to see before switching off becomes worthwhile.
Riot Platforms demonstrated this during the August 2023 heat wave in Texas, when the company told the SEC it had curtailed more than 95% of its power usage during peak demand periods. That month produced $31.7 million, split between $24.2 million in curtailment credits under its ERCOT contract and $7.4 million from the grid operator’s demand response program, against 333 Bitcoin mined and worth roughly $8.9 million.
The arrangement has held through a far weaker market since, with $56.7 million in credits across 2025 and another $21 million in the first quarter of 2026, a 169% increase on the same quarter a year earlier.
The grid Texas built to keep Washington out
ERCOT is a nonprofit corporation that runs both the wires and the marketplace for about 90% of the Texas electric load, which works out to roughly 27 million customers, more than 55,000 miles of transmission and upwards of 1,460 generation units.
Its job is dispatch and settlement. It tells generators when to run, keeps supply and demand matched second by second, and clears the wholesale market where all that electricity gets bought and sold. The utility or retail provider that actually bills customers every month is somebody else entirely, and ERCOT has no say in what it charges.
The shape of the thing comes from a deliberate act of regulatory avoidance. Texas utilities spent the middle of the last century wiring themselves to each other while pointedly avoiding any synchronous connection across a state line, because electricity crossing state lines becomes interstate commerce, and interstate commerce belongs to Washington.
What the state ended up with is an electrical island, tied to the Eastern Interconnection and Mexico through a handful of small direct-current links, answerable to the Public Utility Commission of Texas and the Legislature. So Texas got to run experiments nobody else could, including paying large computing facilities to power down during scarcity.
However, the isolation from neighboring states left it unable to import its way out of Winter Storm Uri in February 2021.
Every all-time peak ERCOT has ever posted arrived in July or August, and last week’s landed around 5 p.m., the hour when air conditioning is still running while solar output falls toward zero.
Winter demand behaves nothing like it. The cold-weather record of roughly 78,300 megawatts came in the 7 a.m. hour on Jan. 16, 2024, when Texans woke into a hard freeze and switched on electric heat before any solar power could be generated. That’s why ERCOT’s winter emergencies happen at dawn, and its summer emergencies happen at dusk. Spring and fall are the forgiving months, with mild afternoons pulling demand well down into the 40,000s and 50,000s.
Growth over the long run comes through in ERCOT’s own peak-demand tables, which put the high at 57,606 megawatts in 2000 against 85,508 in August 2023. Anyone checking last week’s number in the coming weeks should know that ERCOT measures records using integrated load for a full hour and doesn’t count instantaneous readings, so 91,308 is a real-time dashboard number, while its latest preliminary hourly figure is 91,089.
Set that against the other American grid operators, and you get a true sense of proportion here. PJM, which covers 13 states and the District of Columbia, posted a preliminary 168,158 megawatts on July 2 this year, finally breaking a record that had stood since 2006. California’s ISO peaked at 52,061 megawatts during the September 2022 heat wave and hasn’t threatened it since, closing 2025 near 44,500.
New York’s all-time high of 33,939 megawatts also dates to 2006, and the state hasn’t beaten it in two decades. Texas now pulls roughly twice what California does at its worst hour, close to three times New York, and a little over half of PJM while covering one state.
ERCOT reckons one megawatt serves about 250 homes during peak hours, which puts last week’s demand somewhere around 22.8 million households. The 5,800-megawatt increase over the 2023 record accounts for roughly 1.45 million homes’ worth of demand appearing in a single afternoon. And the queue of large users waiting to connect, more than 438,000 megawatts of it in ERCOT’s mid-2026 count, comes to about five times everything Texas has ever consumed at one moment in its history.
What decides when the machines stop?
A Bitcoin mine is a warehouse of specialised chips called ASICs, running continuously while competing for the right to add the next block to Bitcoin’s ledger. The winner collects newly issued coins and transaction fees. Because there’s no partly finished physical product to ruin, the machines can pause and restart within minutes, which makes them more flexible than many other industrial consumers.
A 500-megawatt facility that drops to 50 megawatts frees 450 megawatts for other customers, improving the balance by roughly what a 450-megawatt generator would contribute.
The physical actions differ significantly. A gas plant produces electricity, a battery discharges electricity it stored earlier, and a mine reduces the amount it draws. Only the first two can keep delivering once the mine has already gone to zero.
Four channels pay for that reduction, and Riot’s August 2023 disclosure highlighted two of them.
Facilities exposed to wholesale prices avoid the cost of buying power during scarcity. Operators holding fixed-price contracts resell or credit back electricity that has become more valuable than the Bitcoin it would produce, which is how Riot describes the mechanism in its filings, as credits against future power costs in exchange for power resold.
Qualified sites collect demand-response and ancillary-service revenue under ERCOT’s Load Resource programs, a route the grid operator’s own leadership has pushed miners toward. And large customers lower future transmission bills by cutting consumption during the four coincident-peak intervals Texas uses to allocate those charges, a summer-afternoon exercise running from June through September.
All four converge on one comparison, and a recent preprint from Subir Majumder of Texas A&M and Harvard puts a number on it. Using Texas market data, the paper finds mining load declining as electricity costs climb through both the wholesale-price channel and the coincident-peak channel.
The strength of that response weakens when hashprice is higher, pushing the implied curtailment threshold toward higher wholesale prices. Majumder marks a representative contracted power cost near $30 per megawatt-hour among large Texas miners, and treats mining flexibility as economically state-dependent, warning that counting on it as a stable demand-response resource can overstate what’s actually available. The work is aggregated across facilities and remains a preprint, so it describes a pattern more than a facility-by-facility measurement.
Riot’s own accounts show that pattern in dollars, and they move with the power market as much as with the grid’s needs. Credits totalled $71.2 million in 2023, the year that turned curtailment into a mining business model, fell to $33.7 million in 2024, then recovered to $56.7 million last year, close to $10,000 for every Bitcoin the company mined.
In the first quarter of 2026, credits pulled its net power cost down to 3.0 cents per kilowatt-hour from 3.7 cents across 2025, and its cash cost to mine a Bitcoin came in at $44,629 against an average Bitcoin price of $75,964 for the quarter.
What Texas is buying, and what it’s assuming
Senate Bill 6, signed in June 2025, moved the state toward obligations it can enforce. Transmission-voltage large loads interconnecting after Dec. 31, 2025 need curtailment protocols allowing them to be shed during firm load shed, and ERCOT was directed to competitively procure demand reductions from customers drawing 75 megawatts or more.
The same law requires the Public Utility Commission to finish reviewing the coincident-peak methodology behind wholesale transmission charges and amend its rules by Dec. 31, 2026. That deadline touches one of the four revenue channels directly, and any change to it moves the threshold at which a miner decides an afternoon shutdown pays.
Close to 90% of that connection queue comes from data centers, which has changed the political position miners occupy. CryptoSlate has covered how they now compete for the same interconnection capacity as AI operators, how they’ve curtailed during winter emergencies when prices spiked, and how the contest for megawatts has reshaped the argument they make to regulators.
Controlled reductions and uncontrolled disconnections behave very differently on the system. ERCOT identified 26 ride-through events between January 2023 and September 2025 in which crypto facilities dropped more than 100 megawatts during voltage disturbances, with losses ranging from 17% to 95% of pre-disturbance consumption.
A failed west Texas transformer in December 2022 knocked nearly 400 crypto mines, data centers, and oil and gas facilities offline at once, creating a surplus of almost 1,700 megawatts and forcing 112 megawatts of generation to shut down. Four clusters that failed ERCOT’s 2026 screening could each trip more than 5,000 megawatts, which explains why the operator’s board has pushed ride-through performance up its priority list ahead of this summer.
We’ve also seen competition for the flexible role, and it performed well during the record. Batteries discharged a record 11,980 megawatts on July 22, while solar output has since set a record near 34,700 megawatts, helping cover the evening ramp. Storage carries an advantage a mine can’t match, since it adds energy to the system and can be dispatched on a schedule the operator sets.
The curtailable share is shrinking from the inside too, as sites convert toward AI and high-performance computing where tenants sign uptime commitments that remove the option to power down on a hot afternoon. Riot’s Rockdale campus, the site behind those 2023 credits, now hosts a leased AMD data center, and CryptoSlate covered the $19 billion in AI deals pulling operators the same way this week.
The flexibility Texas can lean on this summer is partly a product of a bad year for mining. Network difficulty has fallen about 14% since January, and 2026 is heading toward the first annual decline in Bitcoin’s history, because so many machines have been going offline.
A Bitcoin recovery would reverse the math that’s making those shutdowns painless, and the decision would be taken in boardrooms and on global exchanges while ERCOT watches a Texas thermometer. Contracts, telemetry, and performance penalties are what convert a commercial preference into capacity a grid operator can schedule.