A mining facility can earn more by shutting down than by running. Grid operators pay for the ability to remove load on demand, and mining is unusually well suited to selling it.
Why grids pay for reduction
Electricity must be produced and consumed at the same instant, and an operator balancing the system needs supply and demand to match continuously.
Building generation for the highest hour of the year is expensive, since that capacity sits idle almost all the time.
Paying large consumers to stop during those hours is often cheaper, so operators run programs that compensate participants for being interruptible.
What makes mining an ideal participant
Most industrial loads cannot stop instantly. A smelter, a data center serving customers, or a chemical process has commitments that interruption would violate.
Mining has no such commitments. Machines can be switched off in seconds and switched back on later, with no work lost beyond the revenue for those hours.
The load is also large, concentrated at a single point and precisely controllable, which is exactly what an operator needs from a demand response resource.
Two ways the money arrives
One route is a capacity-style arrangement paying for the commitment to be available, whether or not the reduction is ever called.
The other is energy-based, where a miner holding a fixed-price contract simply sells its power back into the market when prices spike above what it pays.
Both convert flexibility into revenue, and both mean a facility's income is partly independent of what mining itself is currently earning.
The economics of choosing to stop
The decision is a continuous comparison between the value of the electricity and the value of the mining output that electricity would produce.
When power prices exceed that threshold, running is the worse option, and stopping is the profit-maximizing choice rather than a sacrifice.
Sophisticated operations automate this, curtailing machine by machine as prices move rather than treating the facility as a single switch.
Why this attracts scrutiny
Critics point out that payments for reduction are funded by other ratepayers, and that a facility being paid to stop was still consuming heavily beforehand.
Supporters argue the flexible load improves grid economics by financing generation that would otherwise lack a buyer during low-demand periods.
The dispute is genuine and unresolved, and it turns on whether the added load makes the system cheaper overall or simply relocates who pays for peak capacity.