Texas paid Bitcoin miner more than $31M to cut energy usage - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37428605 - Sept 2023 (130 comments)
Texas paid Bitcoin miner Riot $31.7M to shut down in August - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37418866 - Sept 2023 (55 comments)
An aluminum smelter uses a humongous amount of power to, well, smelt aluminum. Due to the square-cube law the aluminum takes a really long time to cool back down. When you are trying to heat something from 20C to 700C it doesn't really matter if you take a break in the middle of the heating cycle. Sure, it might cool down from 500C back to 450C, but who cares?
As long as they get paid enough to make up for their workers getting an unscheduled paid day off, the smelter really isn't going to complain too much.
Some lobbyists must have lined some pockets.
The issue with "pure" surge pricing is that it doesn't solve the actual problem. Most businesses - even "non-essential" ones will have fixed-price electricity contracts. They are not affected by surge pricing on the electricity market and have zero incentive to reduce their usage even when the market price spikes 100x.
In practice the "market forces" here are a bunch of Wall Street investors losing a shitton of money because their bets went sideways, but that is not going to fix the grid itself.
