It seems like in the immediate term, and possibly forever, part of the process of decarbonizing the electricity sector is going to be demand management -- we have a finite amount of clean power available, and bottlenecks (interconnection, permitting, etc.) on the speed with which more can be built, so some of the work will just be discouraging use. It doesn't strike me as unreasonable that, if _some_ use needs to be discouraged, the state should have some opinion as to which use it is that gets the short straw, especially since a flat tax on all use would be super regressive: if higher electricity prices mean some retiree in the sun belt can't afford their AC in the summer and dies of heat stroke, avoiding that by shifting the costs onto crypto bros seems like a no-brainer.

All of this probably becomes even more true as load-shifting becomes a bigger deal. Like: currently, replacing gas-powered boilers for 24/7 industrial processes with electrified heating isn't anywhere near cost-effective if you have to pay peak electricity rates for heating, but there are a bunch of new heat-battery companies spinning up that will take advantage of wholesale fluctuations to generate a ton of heat in the middle of the day when the sun's out, heat up a big box of rocks or whatever, and they siphon off the heat over the course of the day as electricity prices spike in the evening. This could dramatically accelerate industrial-heat decarbonization (which is something like 30% of US GHG emissions), but it only works if there's a price trough to take advantage of; if there are crypto-miners there to gobble up all the curtailed power and stabilize the price, the economics don't pencil out, and we're stuck with gas heat for factories. Again, doesn't seem unreasonable as a thing the state would have an opinion about.