Bitcoin Seeks ‘Pollution for Profit’ in New York
Activists organize against using fossil fuel plants as tools for cryptocurrency.
In upstate New York’s Finger Lakes region, where a private equity firm set up shop to enter the Bitcoin sweepstakes, the threat that cryptocurrency poses to the climate has become crystal clear.
Here’s the backstory.
In 2014, Connecticut-based Atlas Holdings bought a mothballed, coal-fired electric power plant on the shores of Seneca Lake. Three years later, the facility—Greenidge Generation—was restarted as a natural gas-fired plant. Local residents expected it would just be used to provide electricity at peak user times. The plant operated at only 6 percent capacity in 2019.
But by August 2020, Forbes magazine described Greenidge as “one of the largest” Bitcoin cryptocurrency facilities in the United States. Catering to the crypto craze, the plant has grown at a rapid rate, spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and using its energy to power thousands of high-speed computers.
All this has sounded alarms, not only because the Greenidge facility presents a new environmental peril to the Finger Lakes, but also because it sets a precedent for the state’s forty-nine retired or underused power plants that could be targeted for cryptocurrency use. Meanwhile, Greenidge has begun expanding its money-driven Bitcoin operations into other states.
“We are in the middle of a climate crisis. Burning more fossil fuel and emitting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to make virtual currency is literally insane,” says Yvonne Taylor, vice president of the Seneca Lake Guardian, a nonprofit “dedicated to preserving and protecting the health of the Finger Lakes.”
A Seneca Lake resident, Taylor has been active in environmental causes for more than a decade. She and her partner, Joseph Campbell, formed Gas Free Seneca, which helped to lead the successful fight against using caverns around Seneca Lake to store fracked natural gas.
Yvonna Taylor
Now environmentalists face a new Goliath. Consider the Greenidge plant’s own statistics: 374,814 metric tons of greenhouse gases were emitted in 2020. Even more—520,336 metric tons—are projected to be emitted this year, as well as for each of the next four years. The annual total emissions caused by the Greenidge plant is projected to reach 952,958 metric tons for 2022, and each year through 2026.
New York’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act rightly requires that the greenhouse gas totals of New York plants include emissions created by the out-of-state production and transmission of the natural gas they use.
Robert Howarth
Robert Howarth, professor of ecology and environmental biology at Cornell University, says that since New York produces so little natural gas, almost all the natural gas used at Greenidge is fracked gas from the Marcellus Shale formation in Pennsylvania, and possibly from Ohio and West Virginia.
“If we are to meet the goals of the [act],” Howarth says, “we have to reduce the use of natural gas statewide.”
The vast majority of people who spoke against renewal of the facility’s air permits
at the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s October 13 hearing opposed the repurposing of the Greenidge facility for Bitcoin.