My final thoughts on it:
He is in an old/older neighborhood and most likely the distribution grid for it is woefully undersized for Today's loads. Yeah each residence may have been setup with 100-200A service but in no way was it expected for so many folks wanting to
actually use something even near what they rightfully should expect to be able to use. The substation (where the transformer(s) is) and local distribution lines/transformers are just not big enough.
All part of the 'deteriorating and aging Power Grid' so often talked about. Bottom for OP is that in true Democrat/Greenie fashion they intend to pay for any upgrades to what should be
entirely THE UTILITIES PROBLEM and responsibility to correct by forcing existing 'heavy' users to either 'change their ways' or have go to commercial rates and
more to the point - per-kw 'setup' fees in January. God forbid you have an all-electric home with electric oven, range, and heat and live in a cold area...
As to coin mining of any sort/size being a commercial operation, well, yes it is. The IRS says it is and of course expect their cut when you cash in coins for Fiat. The OP's problem is that his Utility is using that Inconvenient Truth as a club to beat all small home miners (or say folks using a small pottery or glass kiln) in their service area into submission.
Much like high-speed internet and the cable companies. "Too many people are abusing it by streaming movies!" "So lets set arbitrary BW caps totally unrelated to what you think you paid for and also throttle BW from known video providers". btw: said video providers have already paid for their access to the 'net and all bandwidth involved. Tough crap that Comcast/Charter/RR whomever sold product (high-speed internet) they knew from day-1 their service could never provide at advertised speeds to more than a small fraction of connected customers at once.
Adds a whole new possible meaning to the monthly 'Friendly Energy Usage Comparison' email I get each month from DTE. I use 3-4 x the average of '100 homes around me" and 6x the usage of the 'most efficient home'.
At least the grid in my area was fully rebuilt several years ago after a very nasty storm took out major parts of the network all the way to the 300kv main transmission lines feeding us. As in 3 large substations around the metro area fed from them literally exploding... Now substations rebuilt and fully modernized, nice thick shiny new lines from them to us, new poles. local xmfrs,, everything. After power was out from that event for 2 weeks, I got a permanent NG-fueled automatic backup generator for when it happens again. Of course now power is pretty damn stable with the genset kicking in for maybe a total of 3 days since