China has cheap hardware to sell, and they also have the biggest hydroelectric power plants in the world, which means one of the cheapest energy in the world
.iran has power shortages as you mentioned, ofc the energy is not cheap, as it is scarce. Also, hardware are not cheap there...
We saw a coal mine accident and a 30% drop in hashrate, so I think that we should stop with the hydropower stuff by now
That happens only in the rainy season and it's available just for a few miners, the largest chunk of them is still running on coal as both coal and gas are damn cheap.
This move (which I don't think it's actually happening) would indeed make sense if we're talking about gas-powered electricity.
Iran is a gas producer, and you can't actually store that much gas, it's quite expensive so it makes sense economically to sell it in form of energy if there is demand rather than seeing it go to waste, especially when you're Iran and you're under sanction and you have zero pipelines leading to any major buyer with storing capacity as Russia has. You can't actually shut down gas wells in an economically feasible way when there is no demand so rather burn it for power and then, try to sell power if you can't sell gas.
But as far as business relation and long term prospect, probably that would not be the best choice, I would reallocate faster to Russia or any of the former Soviet states that have oil and gas, like kazakhstan or the Arab countries. With this type regime is pretty hard to anticipate what will they think 2 years from now!