Turning Off to Win: The Miner's New Strategy

A Bitcoin mine can earn money by switching its machines off. That was the pitch from David Chernis, Senior Account Executive at CPower, at Mining Disrupt Miami, held June 24 through 26, 2024. Bitcoin was at $61,272 then. On October 16, 2026 it was $82,165.

CPower calls itself the largest demand response provider in the United States, with 6.7 gigawatts across 27,000 sites in markets such as ERCOT, PJM and the New York ISO. Chernis told the room that the key is a strike price, built from the mine's own marginal costs. In his words, the idea is setting a strike price so that you go into curtailment mode when it's more profitable to give your energy back to the grid than it is to mine. He quoted Dan Lawrence of OBM on what that has done to the business.

Miners used to make most of their money from mining. More of them now call themselves energy companies, and some public miners, Chernis said, are making up to 40% of their revenue through demand response. His conclusion was blunt: if you are not participating in demand response in the US now, you are not optimizing your revenue. Chernis broke the money into three streams.

Capacity programs pay a site for being ready to curtail, whether or not the grid calls on it. A 30 megawatt site earns that every day and meets its commitment in a heat wave or a cold snap. Energy covers price spikes and lowers the capacity tag and transmission peak that set next year's power rate, which he called savings rather than revenue. Ancillary services in the day-ahead markets are the newest of the three.

In a PJM example he showed, the mine curtailed automatically when an unexpected price spike crossed its strike price, earned on those hours, and was paid for synchronized reserves in the hours it kept running. Speed is what opens those markets. Chernis called it breaking the sound barrier. CPower has linked a mine to follow the New York ISO's six-second signals, which qualifies it for New York's regulation capacity program.

Its partners include Foreman, Auradyne at the firmware level, and Awesome Miner. He ended on AI. A mine, he said, is an energy shell with capacity and rack space, which is why AI compute is moving into mining sites. A language model cannot simply be stopped, but if about 15% of a GPU load can be ramped up and down like hashrate, those sites can earn in real-time markets and help the grid instead of straining it.

The full story is on Intelligence Disrupt at intelligencedisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.