![]() But critics point out that the enormous electricity consumption needed to sustain the virtual currency is fueling the climate crisis and now threatens a partial resurrection of coal in the US. This tactic, crypto firms argue, generates local jobs – Kentucky aimed to lure currency miners by passing a law that exempts them from an electricity sales tax – and uses up excess power without straining the grid for homes and businesses. And in Kentucky, a new bitcoin facility is being built next to the Big Rivers Electric Corporation, which owns and operates four coal-fired power plants.īitcoin mining machines in a warehouse at the Whinstone US Bitcoin mining facility in Rockdale, Texas. Meanwhile, in western Pennsylvania, thousands of bitcoin mining computers have been packed in shipping containers alongside the Scrubgrass plant, which burns waste coal and was set to close before pivoting to bitcoin. Eric Adams, the new New York City mayor who said he would accept his first paycheck in bitcoin, last week criticised the environmental impact of crypto mining. In 2020, a mothballed coal plant in upstate New York was converted to run on gas and power a large-scale bitcoin mining operation, a move that owner Greenidge Generation said is “bringing a piece of the world’s digital future” to the state. ![]() China, formerly the epicenter of the bitcoin industry, effectively banished around half of the world’s currency miners last year and the resulting search for cheap power has seen companies eye struggling US power stations. Hardin is part of a wave of America’s “zombie” fossil fuel plants that have been brought back from the dead by cryptocurrency companies looking to feed the insatiable energy demands of their mining operations. If you’re concerned about climate change you should have nothing to do with cryptocurrency, it’s a disaster for the climate.” “This isn’t helping old ladies from freezing to death, it’s to enrich a few people while destroying our climate for all of us. “I was horrified to see it all happen, it was a terrible turn of events,” said Hedges, who took to visiting the plant and photographing the new data center as it took shape, fans perched on its roof to help cool the humming computer hardware. Hardin was operating at “near full capacity”, Marathon said in a December update, with the data center producing around 34 bitcoin on 1 December. In the third quarter, a further 206,000 tons of CO2 was emitted, a 905% increase on 2020, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) data shows. Bar charts showing the increase in CO2 emissions and boiler rooms operating days in 2021 at the Hardin power plant.
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