Shannon McGriff Texas Blockchain Summit

Shannon McGriff Serves as Panel Moderator During the 2022 Texas Blockchain Summit in Austin, Texas

On Thursday, November 17th, TEPA’s Executive Director, Shannon McGriff, moderated a panel during the Texas Blockchain Summit in Austin, Texas.

The Summit, which hails as North America’s Premier Policy Conference for the Bitcoin, Crypto, and Blockchain Ecosystem, hosted some of nation’s top business executives, journalists, tech experts, legal counsel, financial advisors and policymakers including Andrew Yang, American businessman and co-creator of the Forward Party and Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

McGriff’s panel, “ERCOT – Demand Response”, included Brad Jones, former interim CEO of ERCOT; Trent Stout, Senior Managing Director, Priority Power Management; Shaun Connell, EVP of Power for Lancium; and Clayton Greer, Vice President, Energy Division, Cholla Petroleum.

Several critical questions relating to the impact of bitcoin mining on the Texas grid were addressed during the 45-minute panel discussion including:

  1. How does demand response provided by mining load support ERCOT’s short term and long term reliability
  2. What demand response product in ERCOT is best provided by mining loads and why?
  3. With higher amounts of intermittent resources making up a larger share of the ERCOT resource mix, why is flexibility so important and how does bitcoin mining (to the extent it’s flexible) stack up against other flexible resources?
  4. Since ERCOT is progressing a rule change that will allow CLR’s to transition from zonal pricing to nodal pricing, how does this help accelerate renewables and enhance grid stability?

“I was honored to be invited to moderate this panel and represent TEPA during the Texas Blockchain Summit,” McGriff said. “I believe it takes people with diverse backgrounds and expertise to help identify solutions that support the evolving energy market. The experts on my panel each offered a unique perspective and identified some key solutions as they relate to the impact that bitcoin mining has on the ERCOT grid.”

For more information about this year’s Texas Blockchain Summit, visit https://www.texasblockchainsummit.org/