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The only solution I can see is :
- when there are no longer possible improvements in ASIC technologies,
- ASICs are sold at marginal cost of production (a few cents per chip),
- Difficulty is so high that a mining operation is only marginally profitable ($100 of electricity mining between $99 and $101 of bitcoins)
Then what may happen is :
- Large mining farms contract with electricity producers and accept to modulate their usage on "orders" given by the grid
- This way they would pay the real-time spot price of electricity (positive or negative)
- At night, or when there is too much wind
, the farm could even be paid to burn electricity !
Your scenario is not very likely to happen. The only solution I can see is :
- when there are no longer possible improvements in ASIC technologies,
- ASICs are sold at marginal cost of production (a few cents per chip),
- Difficulty is so high that a mining operation is only marginally profitable ($100 of electricity mining between $99 and $101 of bitcoins)
Then what may happen is :
- Large mining farms contract with electricity producers and accept to modulate their usage on "orders" given by the grid
- This way they would pay the real-time spot price of electricity (positive or negative)
- At night, or when there is too much wind
, the farm could even be paid to burn electricity !And good luck with network security if mining power is fluctuating heavily.
Of course, if miners would be distributed equally around the globe, electricity spot prices would even out quite well and so would actual hashpower. But a heavy centralization of mining in the countries with lowest electricity prices is much more probable in your scenario.
I don't see how your suggestions could make things better. The only way out I see is a hard fork to PoS. With today's market cap that should be pretty secure. Or all of us support energy-sufficient altcoins by holding more value in a PoS altcoin than in Bitcoin!