Bitcoin miners saved Texas power grid from collapse, but their lucrative pivot to AI is stripping away the emergency brake

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, ...