ERCOT and Bitcoin: The Load It Counts as a Resource

What is ERCOT, and what is it not?

The operator, not the regulator, and not a utility. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas is a membership-based nonprofit that “manages the flow of electric power to 27 million Texas customers – representing about 90 percent of the state's electric load,” running the wholesale market, the interconnection queue, the reserve services, and the programs that ask big customers to stand down; because its wires do not cross a state line, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has no jurisdiction over them.^[1][2]It answers to a board the Legislature rebuilt after Winter Storm Uri – SB 2 of 2021 cut it to eleven members, eight of them chosen by a committee the governor, lieutenant governor, and speaker appoint, all Texans – and to the Public Utility Commission, which approves its rule changes and writes the rules the statutes require.^[3] Whether the mines caused that blackout is a different question, answered on its own page. The board fired Bill Magness in March 2021; Brad Jones ran the operator on an interim basis; Pablo Vegas, from NiSource, was chosen in August 2022 after the governor vetoed at least one candidate, and started October 1.^[4][5] The grid he runs set its record, 91,089 megawatts, on July 22, 2026.^[6] The regulator that approved everything on this page, and sued to keep the mines' registrations secret, is on the Public Utility Commission and Bitcoin; the sites are on the Texas Bitcoin mining map. This page is the operator's account of the load.

How did the mines arrive in ERCOT's queue?

All at once, and mostly on paper. The market status they would use predates them: in June 2020 ERCOT granted the first load-only Controllable Load Resource designation to a Lancium-run computing site at Big Spring, the registration through which a mine can bid its flexibility into the reserve services like a generator.^[7] After China's ban in 2021 the mines came for the cheap West Texas power and the interim chief executive told Bloomberg that a world mining center was “what we are planning.”^[8] On March 25, 2022 ERCOT issued an interim interconnection process for loads of 75 megawatts or more, effective immediately and silent on what they were for; a Large Flexible Load Task Force met from April 14; and the tracked queue ran from 17,376 megawatts on April 26 to 35,142 on August 22, against a summer peak of 80,148.^{[9][10][11][6]} The industry itself told the task force in September that “33,000 MWs is not possible” and that perhaps two gigawatts were actually running – the first sign of the duplicate, speculative requests the Legislature would later call phantom load.^[12] By January 2023 the queue held 38,143 megawatts “predominantly bitcoin mining”; by April 2024, 40,808, with 4,479 approved to energize and an observed simultaneous mining peak of 2,538.^[15][21] In October 2022 seven U.S. senators wrote Vegas, a month into the job, naming seven miners drawing more than a gigawatt and quoting an economist who called them a “tapeworm.”^[8] The organizer who briefed the task force is on Lee Bratcher and Bitcoin.

What did the mines do in the storms?

What ERCOT's program asked, mostly before it asked. On December 6, 2022 ERCOT opened a voluntary curtailment program for “large flexible customers, such as bitcoin mining facilities” – an automated request to cut load after non-spinning reserves are deployed and before emergency service is called – with Woody Rickerson's explanation: “These customers are large power users but have the flexibility and willingness to reduce their energy use quickly, if needed.”^[13] Winter Storm Elliott arrived before the program went live, and ERCOT's report recorded the mines doing it on price alone: registered large flexible loads “curtailed their consumption from 1,530 MW to 130 MW (a 91.5% reduction) during the peak demand,” all twenty known sites, most once prices passed $70 to $110 a megawatt-hour, with 75 megawatts held as responsive reserve.^[14] In Winter Storm Heather a year later the mines curtailed “on several occasions,” the operations chief reported, “but the magnitude of response was not consistent day to day.”^[20] In Winter Storm Fern, in January 2026, the same officer reported that “cryptocurrency mining began reducing ~4,100 MW Saturday” – beside 4,200 from oil and gas and 170 from data centers – and that adding the reductions back would have put Monday's peak at 84,558 megawatts; no emergency was declared and no conservation call was made.^[33] In the summers the story is the same and the money is the argument: in August 2023 Riot curtailed Rockdale by more than 95% at the peaks and booked $31.7 million in credits against 333 bitcoin mined, and the press wrote that ERCOT had paid it. Riot's answer: about $24 million were resale credits under its retail contract with TXU, and about $7 million ERCOT's ancillary-service payments, “less than one percent of the program, which administered nearly $1 billion.”^[16][17] Vegas, asked about the miners that fall: “I'm interested in their operating characteristics.”^[19] The site that curtailed is on Rockdale, Texas and Bitcoin; the company that curtailed it is on Riot Platforms and Texas.

How does ERCOT plan around them?

By definition. The May 2025 Capacity, Demand and Reserves report – the document that says whether Texas has enough power – states: “ERCOT assumes all Loads other than Large Flexible Loads (i.e., crypto-currency mining) are considered Firm Loads … Large Flexible Loads are responsive to real time prices and can reduce consumption or turn off quickly before emergency conditions”; its glossary: “An LFL is typically a crypto-currency mining site.”^[26]The long-term load forecast carries a “Crypto” category and applies a 49.8% peak-to-request factor to the data centers but not to it; the operations division has built a crypto demand-forecasting model, though it “does not explicitly model expected price response.”^[25][33] The Independent Market Monitor's count: more than 2,000 megawatts of mines identified by spring 2023, “more than 3,600 MW of non-coincident demand and more than 3,200 MW of simultaneous demand” by the end of 2024, about 4,600 megawatts in 2025 – “the vast majority of LFLs in ERCOT are cryptocurrency mines.”^[27][34] The Energy Information Administration put the class at 54 billion kilowatt-hours in 2025, a tenth of the grid's consumption.^[24] And in June 2025 ERCOT surveyed every data-center and crypto load over 75 megawatts and set 2,600 megawatts as the most the grid can lose in an instant without breaching its frequency limits – the number that became the ride-through rule the commission adopted in July 2026, after twelve large-load trip events in 2025.^[28][33] Rickerson, in July 2024: mining “can draw up to 2,600 megawatts” and “represents the largest share of large flexible loads.”^[22] The statute that made the planning binding is on Phil King and Bitcoin.

What do the mines sell ERCOT, and what did the monitor say?

Their off switch, and that the price was already buying it. Mines participate three ways: as Controllable Load Resources bidding into the responsive and non-spinning reserves, as price-responsive load that shuts off when the four coincident summer peaks set their transmission bill, and as providers of the Emergency Response Service, a fixed-budget program that pays customers to stand ready to curtail on ERCOT's call. ERCOT's own presentation on January 7, 2026 showed the third: crypto mining “increased to 64% of the total capacity procured” for the winter term, from nine resources in late 2023 to seventy-five, inside a $75 million annual budget – and on September 6, 2023, about 60% of the reserve had switched itself off before ERCOT instructed it.^[32] The market monitor's 2025 report, published in June 2026, drew the conclusion: “all 12 registered CLRs are cryptocurrency mines”; crypto exceeds 64% of emergency reserve capacity; and because those mines “are responsive to real time prices,” “allowing them to provide ERS essentially pays them to do what they would already do” – with a recommendation to move them out of the service, and a warning that flexible loads “can shift a disproportionate share of transmission costs onto other consumers.”^[34] ERCOT filed NPRR1337 on May 26, 2026 to add a baseline test excluding price-responsive loads from the service, and the demand-management service SB 6 requires must, by ERCOT's own reading, exclude any customer “that curtails in response to the wholesale price of electricity.”^[40][39] Two corrections the record requires. The monitor's complaint that ERCOT's contingency reserve service “generated artificial shortages that produced massive inefficient market costs, totaling more than $12 Billion in 2023” was about how much reserve ERCOT chose to hold; the mines are not named in it.^[18] And the Senate committee that heard Vegas in June 2024 recommended, in its interim report, evaluating miners “acting as ‘energy traders’” – the frame the Legislature has since adopted.^[23] The senator who wrote the registry the commission enforces is on Nathan Johnson and Bitcoin.

What happened to the queue?

It stopped being about mines. Kristi Hobbs told the commission in October 2025 that the first wave was “mostly crypto-mining” with a “much shorter timeline to interconnect (months rather than years)” and that the current wave was AI data centers; in December she told the board the queue held about 226 gigawatts against 63 a year earlier, 73% data centers, with 225 new requests in 2025 against 152 in the three years before: “We have outgrown the process that was established for reviewing these large loads. It was originally set up for, we were thinking about 40 to 50 loads back in the 2022 time frame.”^[29][30][31] The Congressional Research Service read the same deck as about 20 gigawatts of crypto – nine percent.^[2] ERCOT created an Interconnection and Grid Analysis division and hired McKinsey.^[42] By April 2026 the queue was 410 gigawatts, 87% data centers; on June 18 the commission approved Batch Zero – NPRR1325 and PGRR145, every request studied with every other twice a year, loads energized before July 10 counted as base – with 438 gigawatts pending, “the first time any U.S. ISO has implemented a batch assessment process.” Vegas: “This new process represents a fundamental shift in how ERCOT manages the significant growth of large load interconnection.”^[35][36] On July 22 the grid set its record; Vegas, a week later: “The ease at which we got through last week's peaks would not be the way I would characterize the future in two to three years. I think it will be much more difficult.”^[6][41] On August 3 the Governor cited 474 gigawatts and ordered an audit of every data center before more are approved; ERCOT missed its August 7 classification deadline, the commission granted an exception on August 20, and the audit covers 250 to 300 projects with a community-impact review of every crypto facility of 25 megawatts or more. Chad Seely: “Our goal is to head toward a December 10 filing.”^[37][38] The chairman who will hear the results is on Ken King and Bitcoin.

The honest counterweight: the monitor, the money, and the process

Three things, and the operator's own documents supply all of them. First, the monitor. ERCOT built the market status the mines use, wrote them into its plans as the grid's only non-firm load, and let them fill two-thirds of an emergency service – and the analyst it pays to watch its market concluded that the service pays them for what the price already buys, and that their flexibility shifts transmission costs onto everyone else.^[7][26][34]ERCOT's response, NPRR1337, came the month before the report. Second, the money, which cuts the other way. The headline figures – Riot's $31.7 million month, the monitor's twelve billion – are not ERCOT paying miners: a fifth of the first was ERCOT's and none of the second was about them, and ERCOT has never published what its services pay the mines in total.^[17][18] What it has published is what the mines did when it mattered: 91.5% in Elliott, four gigawatts in Fern, on price, before any instruction.^[14][33] Third, the process. The interim interconnection rule of March 2022 was still the rule in 2026; the curtailment program was “temporary” and never replaced; the task force went inactive; and the operator's own planning chief said it had outgrown a process built for fifty loads while it held requests for four hundred gigawatts.^{[9][13][10][31]} The mines were the first to show ERCOT that its queue could be gamed and the first to show it that load could be a resource. Both lessons arrived in 2022. The rules for the first came in 2026.

The fair reading is that ERCOT has been the mines' most useful institution and their most honest one: it built the product they sell, counted them accurately when no one else would, credited them in every storm report, and then published the analysis that says it has been overpaying them. The question its own monitor has put to it – whether a load that switches off for the price should also be paid to promise to – is the question the Legislature's demand-management service answers no, and ERCOT's rule change would answer no, and the mines' business model needs answered yes.

Where does ERCOT stand today?

As of September 2026: a record peak three months old, a queue of 474 gigawatts under audit with a December 10 filing targeted, Batch Zero paused at classification, NPRR1337 pending, a demand-management service being designed to exclude the mines, and a chief executive telling Texans the next two or three summers will be harder.^{[6][38][40][39][41]} The mines that sit inside it – about 4,600 megawatts, less than a tenth of what is waiting behind them – are on the Texas Bitcoin mining map; the regulator that oversees the operator is on the Public Utility Commission and Bitcoin; the statute-by-statute record ERCOT implements is on the Texas Bitcoin law timeline. This page is the load the operator counts as a resource, and the price it has decided that resource is worth.