Dan Lawrence, CEO of Foreman, opened his session at Mining Disrupt Miami 2023, recorded July 25–27, 2023, with a short brief: electricity prices are high, and miners need a way to stay profitable through market volatility. His test case was LZ West in ERCOT, which he called one of the most volatile markets out there.
Foreman began with a personal problem. Lawrence said he was a small-scale hobby miner around 2017, with his mine about an hour's drive from home. He grew tired of driving up to reboot machines, driving back, and turning around again when they went offline. The company built software to automate that work. He described Foreman today as mining management software for machine management, automated operations, custom rules and triggers, remote reboots and site visualizations.
The point of the talk, though, was one specific job: removing the need to use breakers to curtail a facility.
Agility before the halving
Lawrence framed the argument around the next halving, then less than a year away. Once every miner starts earning less Bitcoin, he said, the operators who keep mining profitably will be the most efficient and the most agile. Agility means turning machines off and on very quickly to avoid peak prices, and that, in his view, rules out flipping breakers by hand.
agility is going to be key being able to turn on and off very quick to avoid Peak prices
Dan Lawrence · 1:37
The S19j Pro break-even line
To show how volatile the market is, Lawrence put up a chart of LZ West electricity prices against the break-even point for an S19j Pro. Every price below the line is profitable mining; every price above it is mining at a loss. At the top of the chart, prices came close to five thousand dollars a megawatt hour.
close to five thousand dollars a megawatt hour so if you're a small scale operation and you're index exposed
Dan Lawrence · 2:43
For a small operation paying real-time prices, he said, a spike like that with the machines still running means "there goes the mine." The objective is to mine only below the line.
He then gave the distribution for all of 2022. In LZ West, 8.37 percent of the time pricing sat above $102 a megawatt hour, which he read as more than one hour in twelve spent mining at a loss for anyone left running. The expensive hours cluster in the hot middle of the day from June through September, when operators are also chasing 4CP windows; prices are cheaper on both sides of that peak.
4CP refers to ERCOT's four summer coincident peaks, the intervals that set a large customer's transmission charges for the following year. Lawrence's point was that a miner in LZ West is trying to do two things at once in those months: hit the 4CP windows and avoid the high-price blowouts that come with the heat. On a chart of the whole ERCOT year, he said, the red and yellow bands sit in the middle, during June, July, August and September, and the green sits on either side.
489 hours and 810 breaker flips
Lawrence turned those numbers into a workload. Price blowouts averaged $494 a megawatt hour, and across the year there were 489 hours in which mining was not profitable. Avoiding them by hand would take 810 breaker flips.
you're going to be turning Breakers 810 times just to stay profitable mining in [ERCOT]
Dan Lawrence · 4:31
If each breaker controls about a megawatt, a 10-megawatt site would throw breakers eight thousand one hundred times a year, he said. With ERCOT prices changing every five to fifteen minutes, nobody can stand at the panel and keep up. The curtailment has to be fully automated.
A strike price that keeps moving
Foreman's answer is automation software that removes the manual step and calculates the site's real-time strike price, the electricity price below which the machines make money. Lawrence said that number moves constantly: network difficulty adjusts, ordinals inscriptions arrive on the blockchain, and transaction fees go through the roof. A strike price set once and forgotten leaves revenue on the table.
The practical result, he said, is that nobody has to be at the facility turning breakers on and off every five minutes. The software holds the strike price, watches the real-time price, and switches the machines when one crosses the other.
He gave one result. On June 20, Foreman's price avoidance turned customers' machines off and back on as prices moved during one of the hottest days in ERCOT.
we actually saved our customers about 3.7 million dollars just avoiding High electricity prices during one of the hottest days in [ERCOT]
Dan Lawrence · 5:47
Lawrence said Foreman runs price avoidance in pretty much every market and every ISO.
Demand response as halving insurance
Avoiding high prices is one half of the plan. The other is finding additional revenue. Foreman also automates demand response, so miners can take part in curtailment programs, help balance the grid and be paid for it.
you're avoiding those High electricity prices
Dan Lawrence · 6:08
His example came from PJM. A 100-megawatt site enrolled in a demand response program could earn a little over nine million dollars, he said, in exchange for turning off if it is ever called. That money, he said, is what carries a miner through the halving. He kept the talk short and closed by offering to take questions from the floor.
Then and now
When Lawrence spoke on July 25, 2023, Bitcoin traded at $29,125. On October 15, 2026, it trades at $81,431. The halving he was preparing miners for has since happened, and the question he raised, how to run only below the break-even line, applies to every site that is index exposed.
The next Mining Disrupt runs March 22 to 24, 2027, at the Irving Convention Center in Irving, Texas.