that assumes the use/utility of the computation is 0. We can all debate if that's true or not about cryptomining.
One day we may heat our homes with distributed computing like BOINC.
Consider the house that marginally has electrical resistive wall heaters (Like the bay area) and an excess of spare computers sitting around (also like the bay area) ... It's marginally better for the house nerd to leave their PCs on using BOINC than run the wall heater.
If by mining, you mean cryptocurrency creation, the utility is effectively 0. You can achieve the same utility if a cryptocurrency simply credited all new coins to my wallet. If by mining, you mean validating transactions, then that's something you have to do all year round, even if it's warm. That makes about as much sense as asking VISA to send me a rack that does computations for them only when my home is under 20 C.
