New York power plant starts mining Bitcoin, increases emissions by 6x
web3isgoinggreat.com
A mostly-dormant coal power plant near Seneca Lake in New York was converted to natural gas in 2017 and began devoting much of its power generation to mining Bitcoin in 2019. The plant went from generating a total of 39,406 tons of carbon emissions in 2019 to generating a total of 243,103 tons in 2020, its first full year mining Bitcoin—the equivalent of the emissions that would be produced to provide electricity to around 35,000 households. The plant was operating at only 13% of its capacity in 2020, but has plans to increase its mining operations. Locals who enjoy Seneca Lake for swimming and other leisure activities have said that, due to the plant, Seneca Lake is now "so warm you feel like you're in a hot tub". This is because the plant circulates around 135 million gallons of water a day from the lake to the cool the plant, outputting water directly into the lake at allowed temperatures up to 86–108˚F (though the plant claims its average outflow temperature is 50˚, only 7˚ warmer than the inflow temperature).Locals of the area have demanded that the Department of Environmental Conservation review the air emissions permit for the plant rather than renew an old one, which the DEC agreed to do, though they have delayed a new decision until March 31. Many pressing for permit review were unhappy with the delay, with the Seneca Lake Guardian reporting, "This delay from the DEC is not benign... Every day that Gov. Hochul and Commissioner Seggos drag their feet on this (permitting) decision is another day for Greenidge to continue expanding operations."

A mostly-dormant coal power plant near Seneca Lake in New York was converted to natural gas in 2017 and began devoting much of its power generation to mining Bitcoin in 2019. The plant went from generating a total of 39,406 tons of carbon emissions in 2019 to generating a total of 243,103 tons in 2020, its first full year mining Bitcoin—the equivalent of the emissions that would be produced to provide electricity to around 35,000 households. The plant was operating at only 13% of its capacity in 2020, but has plans to increase its mining operations. Locals who enjoy Seneca Lake for swimming and other leisure activities have said that, due to the plant, Seneca Lake is now "so warm you feel like you're in a hot tub". This is because the plant circulates around 135 million gallons of water a day from the lake to the cool the plant, outputting water directly into the lake at allowed temperatures up to 86–108˚F (though the plant claims its average outflow temperature is 50˚, only 7˚ warmer than the inflow temperature).

Locals of the area have demanded that the Department of Environmental Conservation review the air emissions permit for the plant rather than renew an old one, which the DEC agreed to do, though they have delayed a new decision until March 31. Many pressing for permit review were unhappy with the delay, with the Seneca Lake Guardian reporting, "This delay from the DEC is not benign... Every day that Gov. Hochul and Commissioner Seggos drag their feet on this (permitting) decision is another day for Greenidge to continue expanding operations."

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/some-locals-say-bitcoin-mining-operation-ruining-one-finger-lakes-n1272938

The Greenidge plant houses at least 8,000 computers and is looking to install more, meaning it will have to burn even more natural gas to produce more energy.

  • Owl [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Bitcoin is a product of early 2000s internet libertarian ideology. They thought the only thing wrong with markets is central banking and government control, and that we should go back to the gold standard. So of course when they made their decentralized money system, they designed it to mimic gold, by having a fixed supply that gets harder and harder to mine.

    Also the entire reason it takes so much electricity is that they used cryptography to build the world's most expensive clock.

    • Wheaties [she/her]
      ·
      3 years ago

      A decentralized database with an append-only write system is itself also pretty wasteful of electricity and computation cycles.

      • Owl [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        A decentralized database with an append-only write system isn't that bad. There's good reasons for append-only, especially in finance. And replicating a database only costs as many times more as your number of replicas.

        The thing about bitcoin that costs so much is that they need to enforce an ordering between these decentralized transactions, so you can't get free money by spending the last bitcoin in your wallet in two places at once. And they enforce that they slow down the entire system so it takes about 10 minutes per transaction, so every computer can catch up to every transaction before any happen. And to enforce that they use that ridiculous proof of work algorithm, so computers have to do arbitrary cryptography until however much computing power the whole network has still takes 10 minutes.

        For reference on just how wasteful Bitcoin is - a traditional database running on my laptop could easily run 1000x as much traffic as the entire Bitcoin network.

      • silent_water [she/her]
        ·
        3 years ago

        that's not actually what consumes most of the power - it's that the decentralized append-only database needs to accept writes with zero trust in the presence of an arbitrary number of hostile entities attempting to subvert it. the reality is that you almost never need that property and if you remove it you get an infinitely more useful class of datastructures called CRDTs - Conflict-free Replicated Data Types.