[nullc]

You're getting confused by accounting here. Charging someone regular rates but then making payments for them to shut off during high demand is equivalent to the customer being charged lower rates for excess power.

The utility prefers the former model because it avoids normalizing low rates, avoids running into issues with most-favored-nation terms in contracts, gets them paid upfront while they pay out the correction only when it was actually needed, doesn't run into problems with "what if they don't actually turn off during the high demand but you still charged low rates the last N months", etc.

But what's happening is equivalent to "utility sells spare capacity to bitcoin miners at discounted rates" which is hardly remarkable.