I think aluminum smelters have big costs to restart after shutting down, so it makes sense to pay them. Bitcoin would take less than a minute to start mining again.
The entire reason aluminum smelters are happy to play along is because their restart costs are relatively cheap.
An aluminum smelter uses a humongous amount of power to, well, smelt aluminum. Due to the square-cube law the aluminum takes a really long time to cool back down. When you are trying to heat something from 20C to 700C it doesn't really matter if you take a break in the middle of the heating cycle. Sure, it might cool down from 500C back to 450C, but who cares?
As long as they get paid enough to make up for their workers getting an unscheduled paid day off, the smelter really isn't going to complain too much.
An aluminum smelter uses a humongous amount of power to, well, smelt aluminum. Due to the square-cube law the aluminum takes a really long time to cool back down. When you are trying to heat something from 20C to 700C it doesn't really matter if you take a break in the middle of the heating cycle. Sure, it might cool down from 500C back to 450C, but who cares?
As long as they get paid enough to make up for their workers getting an unscheduled paid day off, the smelter really isn't going to complain too much.