Never mind that ERCOT staff have highlighted the potential benefits of bitcoin mining wrt power costs for consumers; Brad Jones, who managed ERCOT, has stated, "Bitcoin mining has helped keep prices low for all Texans". The experts must be wrong 🤷🏼♀️
As a former energy regulator myself who worked on residential & industrial electricity pricing in Canada, here's my perspective on why miners are more likely to have a beneficial cost impact
An electricity grid requires 3 key infrastructure pieces: generation, transmission (tx), distribution (dx) - infra that is capital intensive. These are paid for by ratepayers overtime, & sometimes taxpayers (eg nuclear in Ontario was amortized over decades by both)
Generation infrastructure is overbuilt in the sense that it has to be sufficient to meet peak demand (eg consumers running AC on hottest days). For much of the time, only some generation is running & it's the the cheapest sources and/or those that take a long time to ramp up (eg a nuclear reactor cold start can take a few days). Generation sources come online during higher demand periods typically in order of the cheapest (marginal cost of power for renewables tends to be cheap) to most expensive (eg fossil sources where theres a commodity cost for power)
Often our North American grids have a marketplace & price bidding in place to ramp up generation. If there are price sensitive large loads that can turn off on a dime during peak hours, then we don't need to overbuild the system for peak demand because they can shut off vs expensive sources turning on to balance supply & demand
What makes bitcoin miners unique loads (ie consumers) is they can act like a virtual power plant by shutting off within seconds at peak events. This is very different from traditional industries that are limited on how fast or long they can shut down for (eg you don't want to spoil a batch of steel or chemicals), or trad data centers whose customers require their data to be on & available at all times. Miners are also more electricity cost sensitive because they're in an ultra competitive industry & they can shut down during high prices (when more expensive sources come online)
So if miners use 2GW in Texas, it doesn't need to build 2 extra GW for miners because there is spare in the system if they shut down - like a virtual power plant that can come online & provide 2GW
The electricity system has costs all ratepayers need to pay: generation + transmission + distribution + regulator/system operator costs (ie costs of managing the system). If there are new loads that come in & can operate in such a way that don't increase peak demand, then the system will not require new costly infrastructure. And we know miners will not want to mine at high marginal costs of the next MW
Further, such large loads will contribute to paying down existing infrastructure costs (being amortized) & other system fees, which means that all other ratepayers will not need to pay as much - as these costs are being spread out over more electricity consumers!
Lastly, miners are co-locating in Texas next to transmission constrained renewables - ie there's not enough tx capacity to get the power (that's located in an optimal generation site) to load centers like far away large cities. So miners in fact subsidize generation until tx is built out: the renewable power is stranded until it's connected to large loads
Thus, one cannot assume that 2GW of miners will need 2GW of new gen, just as it's wrong to discount the impact miners have wrt helping paying for system infra. So at minimum Wood Mackenzie needs to show their work, but likely go back to the drawing board wrt how miners operate irl (vs an economic model based on trad industries)
Lastly, 👆🏻 is a simplification of a complex system, but at a high level it explains how miners are able to lower costs for both ratepayers & taxpayers & benefit modern grids
Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't share a key paper examining miner impact on ERCOT grid: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4634256
And Daniel Batten compiled other notable papers: https://twitter.com/DSBatten/status/1756960322295074843?t=Bd2kukIVlFAZJTMSHOy33A&s=19