Curtailment & Demand-Response Revenue Calculator for Bitcoin Miners (Canada/US)

Getting paid to turn your miners off during grid peaks sounds like free money, and the demand-response marketing leans hard into that framing. But there’s a cost the brochures skip: every hour you curtail is an hour of mining profit you don’t earn. Whether a curtailment program actually pays depends entirely on which of those two numbers is bigger — the payment for shutting down, or the profit you forgo by shutting down. This calculator does the full accounting across the major Canadian and US programs, and the answer is often the opposite of what people expect.

The counter-intuitive part

Run the numbers and a pattern emerges. A miner with genuinely cheap power and a fat margin can lose money joining a demand-response program that curtails many hours a year, because each of those hours was highly profitable — the capacity payment simply doesn’t beat the stack of forgone profit. The miner who wins at demand response is the one whose power is expensive relative to mining revenue during peak events: for them, curtailing forgoes little or no profit, so the payment is close to pure upside. That’s the honest insight the calculator surfaces — and it’s why the best programs for a profitable miner are the ones with rare events: Alberta’s sub-second Fast Frequency Response, Ontario’s Industrial Conservation Initiative that targets just five system peaks a year, ERCOT’s four coincident-peak intervals. You get the capacity payment for being available while giving up only a handful of hours.

What it models, and what it doesn’t

The program selector fills in the notice window and mining-fit from our demand-response programs dataset, but the payment figures there are indicative — you enter your own tariff’s real capacity and event-energy numbers, because those are negotiated and site-specific. The math is deliberately clean: capacity payment plus any per-MWh event payment, minus the mining gross profit you forgo (your revenue minus your electricity cost, over the curtailed kilowatt-hours). It models the economic trade only. It doesn’t credit the wear-and-tear savings of running your fleet fewer hours, and it doesn’t subtract the penalty clauses some programs levy for missing a called event — both of which matter and both of which you should weigh separately. For the sovereignty angle on Quebec’s rate structure and why the province’s regulatory posture pushes miners toward and away from these programs, see the Canadian curtailment guide; pair this with the demand-charge calculator and cost to mine 1 BTC for the full picture of what your power actually costs.