On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price rockets, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August of 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.
Archive link: https://archive.md/O8Cz9
Now if we could just make not mining cryptocurrency more profitable than mining cryptocurrency 100% of the time, that would be really good.