The gist is that a private equity firm bought a defunct fossil plant and are running it to power mining rigs directly, without any connection to the outside power grid. Apparently this allows them to do an end run around certain regulations and taxes which only apply to grid-connected power plants.
The scariest part is that this is apparently insanely profitable for them. NY is pretty progressive and it would not surprise me if they crack down on this kind of thing, but other states or countries seem unlikely to do that.
All the stories we've read lately about fossil plants shutting down due to being replaced by renewables could ultimately be for nothing if companies like this one buy them all up and restart them.
> The scariest part is that this is apparently insanely profitable for them. NY is pretty progressive and it would not surprise me if they crack down on this kind of thing, but other states or countries seem unlikely to do that.
And this is why you need a carbon tax.
These clowns are basically making money by turning negative externalities into bitcoin. And the best way to deal with a negative externality is to tax the heck out of those folks and thereby either a) make the activity unprofitable, or b) use the resulting revenues to plow into mitigation efforts to offset the effects of the externality.
Seems like a good opportunity for governments to tax their carbon dioxide emissions. It would be easier to get public support for a carbon tax that only targets "unproductive" sources.
Edit: What if governments just imposed a carbon tax on all crypto mining? The legal framework necessary to support that could be extended to cover other carbon sources in the future.
Indeed, Seneca lake is very deep, and naturally thermally stratified in summer:
> Because of Seneca Lake's great depth its temperature remains a near-constant 39 °F (4 °C).[3] In summer the top 10 to 15 feet (3.0 to 4.6 m) warms to 70–80 °F (21–27 °C)
I think crypto mining is a huge waste of energy. But this article has an ax to grind. A simpler explanation for warm surface temps is a warmer than usual summer.
Indeed, NY state has had two major heat waves already this year
How different is this from Cornell's lake source cooling plant? Opponents of that made the same sorts of claims, but afaik were never able to prove that lake temperatures were any different once you get more than a few yards away from where the water was released. E.g.: https://fcs.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/2020-06/Final_FA...
Honestly, even if they did then blaming bitcoin doesn't seem to be the right thing to blame. Blame the plant regulations. I say this agreeing that mining is a huge waste of energy. But going after bitcoin is like blaming a junky and giving the dealer a free pass.
I wonder if part of the problem is that they are maybe water cooling the datacenters full of cryptominers? So not only is there the waste heat from the power plant as originally designed, but also the waste heat of its entire energy output is being dumped into the lake instead of being distributed around town.
I do suspect that this is a surface temperature problem. Lakes form thermal gradients pretty easily so if they are only heating the top layer this power plant could noticeably warm the water even if it is producing nowhere near enough heat to warm the entire lake.
I can't argue against the take that this whole thing is just killing the planet for a profit.
27°C doesn't "feel like a hot tub", so currently it must be higher.
The thermal conductivity of water makes that even a temperature a few degrees cooler than the body temperature feels refreshing, which is not the case right now according to the witnesses.
Oh boy, fermi estimation time! Big caveat: all of the below assumes ideal mixing, which is not a given at this scale at all. So I'm not rubbishing the residents. (Nor disputing the idiocy of burning 45 MW to "mine" numbers for that matter.)
From wiki, the lake has a volume of 15 km3, or 15 trillion litres. The daily discharge of 135 million gallons is ~ 600 million litres. So, per day, it's cycling about 40 parts per million. Alternatively, you'll cycle the volume of the lake once every 67 years at that rate.
That same discharge is ~ 7000 litres per second, which will require 30 MW to heat by one degree Celsius. It's listed at at most 45 MW, so one and a half degrees rise, unless any of the water is evaporated, which it quite possibly is (after all, more is licensed to go in the plant than come out. I wonder if they have some scheme where a small volume of water is heated to a point where evaporation matters, then it is mixed back in?).
Once again, the locals may be noticing, but only if very significant stratification is occurring. Water is good at dissipating heat.
Running 45 MW of miners != Producing 45 MW of energy != Producing producing 45 MW of waste heat. First you have to consider the thermodynamic efficiency of the power plant. With a ~40% efficiency, 1 W of produced heat wastes 1.5 W of heat. Then you have to consider the overhead for running the miners. Ballpark, about half of the energy probably goes to HVAC. Furthermore, that 45 MW of mining power is also eventually getting released as heat, some of which may be returning to the lake.
Overall, 45 MW of bitcoin produced could mean 135 - 180 MW of waste heat.
It's quite likely that the real situation isn't anywhere close to ideal mixing, especially since warm water is lighter and the deep part of the lake might not be mixing efficiently with the warm discharged water. Then the surface water might be warming much more than your calculation suggests, to the point where locals are noticing a major difference.
So putting it all together, assuming no evaporation and ideal mixing, at its current max rate of 45MW it would take 67 years to raise the lake temperature 1.5 degrees Celsius?
This seems rather fishy to me. First of all, they're currently running at only 18MW, and that lake has about 4 billion gallons of water in it. That's not enough energy use to produce a noticeable change in that much water.
Second problem - there are literally no lake water temperatures in the article, either now or historical. The entire premise of the article seems to be that locals feel that it's warmer.
I personally think this kind of power use for bitcoin mining is wasteful and should be heavily taxed, but c'mon man - how about the reporter does a little bit of journalism?
This is shameful either way, but per the NBC article it sounds like they will need a few years to be sure the lake is warming:
> A full thermal study hasn't been produced and won't be until 2023, but residents protesting the plant say the lake is warmer with Greenidge operating. Greenidge recently published average discharged water temperatures from March 1 to April 17, during the trout spawning season; they were around 46 degrees to 54 degrees, with differences between inflow and outflow of 5 degrees to 7.5 degrees.
But apparently they plan to expand this business model.
> In March, Greenidge said its Bitcoin mining capacity of 19 megawatts should reach 45 megawatts by December and may ramp to 500 megawatts by 2025 as it replicates its model elsewhere. Larger gas-fired plants in the U.S. have capacities of 1,500 to 3,500 megawatts.
If I may offer a little critical thinking, to a very biased, alarmist piece. This it seems very clear this is hit piece. It throws around some big numbers and a quote from some local, and comes up very short on analysis, and very big on leading readers into a particular conclusion.
Firstly, using lakes to cool power plants is not unusual or uncommon. They don't really make that clear, and it feels like they want the reader to think this is nefarious. To me the title of this should be something more like "Residents forgot the lake gets warmer when the power plant operates".
As far as the 135 million allowed to be discharged into the lake daily, it is an incredibly small amount compared to the size of the lake. According to Wikipedia, the volume of the lake is 3.81 cu/miles of water. A quick search tells me 1 cu/mi =~ 1.1 trillion gallons. Okay, some more rough math gives us a total of about 4.2 trillion gallons in the lake of which 135M gallons is something like 0.000032% of the total volume.
So my point is that when the article throws a figure like 135M gallons at you with no context it seems huge. But when you look at it in context, 3 one hundred thousands of one percent of the total, I have a hard time imagining that has any measurable impact on the lake whatsoever. I'm sure the quoted resident that lives very near to the plant had noticed the warmth, but anywhere else on the lake?
On top of this, the plant is under strict scrutiny by the regulators, and they appear to be operating withing the limits outlined by said regulators. So if there is anyone to get mad at here it's not the plant operators, it's the Department of Environmental Conservation.
> On top of this, the plant is under strict scrutiny by the regulators, and they appear to be operating withing the limits outlined by said regulators. So if there is anyone to get mad at here it's not the plant operators, it's the Department of Environmental Conservation.
Actually, the correct answer is: both.
There's a difference between what's legal and what's moral or ethical.
It is clear, at least to me, that emitting large quantities of CO2 into the air, and heated waste water into a lake, for the sole purpose of enriching oneself mining cryptocurrencies, is simply immoral. It is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons.
The regulations clearly do not adequately limit this kind of activity.
So we should be angry that the laws don't reflect our values.
And we should be angry that these folks are taking advantage of that fact to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us.
I'm not a fan of starting up power plants for bitcoin mining, but I agree with your analysis. I did the same calculations before finding this thread, so I'll point out that it's 0.0032% not 0.000032% (you need to multiply by 100 for percent).
Your own numbers lack a great deal of context and your comment seems far more biased than this article. The article avoids making any conclusions about the effects on the lake while you seem quite happy to jump to conclusions with insufficient data and bad math.
Edit: My own stance would be that we should wait to until we have the data on how much warming is happening at the various layers of the lake and then use that data assess the regulations governing the power plant. In the meantime, we might look at bringing the regulations for disconnected power plants in-line with grid power plants.
I think it's kind of good that these absurd scenarios involving Bitcoin are driving people (in the larger sense of companies and governments) towards more environmental awareness.
If you think about it, the entire system is just as absurd as Bitcoin. Business pollute the environment we live in, and then get to brag to shareholders about "delivering value", "increased revenue margins", and "efficiency" that they later get rewarded by the stock market for.
The green company that makes a slightly lower profit, but takes care of the environment falls out of the index to be replaced by the polluter that either does the bare minimum, or actively breaks laws and treats fines as the cost of doing business. The market rewards rapacity over environmentalism.
Well, Bitcoin is even more efficient, it's directly burning coal and converting it into money that the market will also pay for!
The (hopefully) good outcome of this is that it will drive corporations and governments to take a breath, and formulate policies that prioritize the long-term health of the environment over short term priorities like jobs and the economy.
+1 here on this analysis ; four or five decades of stupid capital investment and population explosion plus plastics -- no contest ! I literally mean this.
It's like indulgences, for the remission of venial sins. The buyer is delivered publicly a clean bill of moral health, and the seller gets to build some new chateaus, estates and cathedrals.
It's a mechanism that uses market to let the economy and its participants know what actual costs of co2 emissions are instead letting them operate on assumption that they cost zero.
I wouldn't mind if sugar manufacturers would have to buy 'sugar credits' for emitting sugar into the human population.
What's fascinating to me about bitcoin is how much it shortens the chain of transmutation between electricity and money.
A typical situation might involve a business or manufacturer taking power, raw materials, and labor to create something of value and sell it.
With bitcoin, anyone with sufficient capital can simply exploit natural resources and turn it directly into money. It's a capitalist dream: remove nearly all labor from the equation leaving only capital and land (land in the Georgist sense being natural resource like coal, oil, land, water, etc). I think in this way it exposes market failures faster than anything else since the efficiency of capital-infused actors is so high...
> The power plant, Greenidge, which is being closely monitored by the Department of Environmental Conservation, is allowed to suck in 139 million gallons of water and discharge 135 million gallons daily.
What is the rationale for the suck in allowance being 4 million gallons a day higher than the discharge allowance?
There were some discussion among people who want to invest in solar farms. A major hurdle is the interconnection into the grid. There're lots of regulation and large fee to transmit electricity through the gird. From the people who have done it, they just chose not to connect to the grid but sell the electricity directly to the local users, like a local plant. It's quite lucrative with all the tax credits and the sales of green credits while the electricity income was minuscule in comparison. The limitation is they have to be near some major electric users and totally relying on the few users.
With bitcoin mining, it's possible to run a solar farm to mine the coins while disconnected from the grid. I'd imagine it's quite competitive without all the interconnected fees.
This isn't the only crypto mining setup causing problems in rural New York state. A few firms set up shop near the St. Lawrence river in the northern part of the state to take advantage of cheap hydropower and rent. Locals complained that their electricity rates were being jacked up, which resulted in a slew of new rules at the municipal and state level.
How wasteful crypto is depends on how its energy consumption compares to the energy consumption of the traditional banking system.
What is the energy consumption of armed trucks anyway? How much energy is required to build a bank branch?
Sure, the transaction charges are tiny with Bitcoin and storage is free. Is that an indicator of the differences in total energy consumption once the mining is over?
Also, what is the total energy consumed by coping with fiat currency's inflation? Probably should include that.
I think some hyperinflation events also contribute to wars happening. These use energy too.
But BTC does not replace the banking system. The banking system does way way way more than simply hold money in accounts and send it places. I could sort of buy this argument for something like Ethereum that is truly programmable, but even if BTC completely takes over and no other currencies exist then there will still be banks and bank branches.
The discussion of inflation and wars is just fantasy. Everybody in the world using BTC isn't going to end standing armies.
I read the whole article looking for some indication as to the mechanism by which the power plant or mining operation are warming the lake. If there is one, it's not in the article. I assume offloading waste heat from the power plant and/or mining operation? That would have to be one hell of an operation to noticeably change the surface temperature of a lake that big. I wonder if anyone has anything more granular than "feels like a hot tub."
[+] [-] NickM|4 years ago|reply
The gist is that a private equity firm bought a defunct fossil plant and are running it to power mining rigs directly, without any connection to the outside power grid. Apparently this allows them to do an end run around certain regulations and taxes which only apply to grid-connected power plants.
The scariest part is that this is apparently insanely profitable for them. NY is pretty progressive and it would not surprise me if they crack down on this kind of thing, but other states or countries seem unlikely to do that.
All the stories we've read lately about fossil plants shutting down due to being replaced by renewables could ultimately be for nothing if companies like this one buy them all up and restart them.
[+] [-] CarelessExpert|4 years ago|reply
And this is why you need a carbon tax.
These clowns are basically making money by turning negative externalities into bitcoin. And the best way to deal with a negative externality is to tax the heck out of those folks and thereby either a) make the activity unprofitable, or b) use the resulting revenues to plow into mitigation efforts to offset the effects of the externality.
[+] [-] chmod775|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] p1mrx|4 years ago|reply
Edit: What if governments just imposed a carbon tax on all crypto mining? The legal framework necessary to support that could be extended to cover other carbon sources in the future.
[+] [-] deviledeggs|4 years ago|reply
Notice they mentioned "surface temperature". Many lakes are naturally stratified in summer. Especially lakes deep for their size. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_stratification
Indeed, Seneca lake is very deep, and naturally thermally stratified in summer:
> Because of Seneca Lake's great depth its temperature remains a near-constant 39 °F (4 °C).[3] In summer the top 10 to 15 feet (3.0 to 4.6 m) warms to 70–80 °F (21–27 °C)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_Lake_(New_York)
I think crypto mining is a huge waste of energy. But this article has an ax to grind. A simpler explanation for warm surface temps is a warmer than usual summer.
Indeed, NY state has had two major heat waves already this year
[+] [-] Alex3917|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jandrese|4 years ago|reply
I do suspect that this is a surface temperature problem. Lakes form thermal gradients pretty easily so if they are only heating the top layer this power plant could noticeably warm the water even if it is producing nowhere near enough heat to warm the entire lake.
I can't argue against the take that this whole thing is just killing the planet for a profit.
[+] [-] henearkr|4 years ago|reply
The thermal conductivity of water makes that even a temperature a few degrees cooler than the body temperature feels refreshing, which is not the case right now according to the witnesses.
[+] [-] yodelshady|4 years ago|reply
From wiki, the lake has a volume of 15 km3, or 15 trillion litres. The daily discharge of 135 million gallons is ~ 600 million litres. So, per day, it's cycling about 40 parts per million. Alternatively, you'll cycle the volume of the lake once every 67 years at that rate.
That same discharge is ~ 7000 litres per second, which will require 30 MW to heat by one degree Celsius. It's listed at at most 45 MW, so one and a half degrees rise, unless any of the water is evaporated, which it quite possibly is (after all, more is licensed to go in the plant than come out. I wonder if they have some scheme where a small volume of water is heated to a point where evaporation matters, then it is mixed back in?).
Once again, the locals may be noticing, but only if very significant stratification is occurring. Water is good at dissipating heat.
[+] [-] hexane360|4 years ago|reply
Overall, 45 MW of bitcoin produced could mean 135 - 180 MW of waste heat.
[+] [-] not2b|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gkfasdfasdf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djrogers|4 years ago|reply
Second problem - there are literally no lake water temperatures in the article, either now or historical. The entire premise of the article seems to be that locals feel that it's warmer.
I personally think this kind of power use for bitcoin mining is wasteful and should be heavily taxed, but c'mon man - how about the reporter does a little bit of journalism?
[+] [-] dj_gitmo|4 years ago|reply
> A full thermal study hasn't been produced and won't be until 2023, but residents protesting the plant say the lake is warmer with Greenidge operating. Greenidge recently published average discharged water temperatures from March 1 to April 17, during the trout spawning season; they were around 46 degrees to 54 degrees, with differences between inflow and outflow of 5 degrees to 7.5 degrees.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/some-locals-say-...
But apparently they plan to expand this business model.
> In March, Greenidge said its Bitcoin mining capacity of 19 megawatts should reach 45 megawatts by December and may ramp to 500 megawatts by 2025 as it replicates its model elsewhere. Larger gas-fired plants in the U.S. have capacities of 1,500 to 3,500 megawatts.
[+] [-] 40four|4 years ago|reply
Firstly, using lakes to cool power plants is not unusual or uncommon. They don't really make that clear, and it feels like they want the reader to think this is nefarious. To me the title of this should be something more like "Residents forgot the lake gets warmer when the power plant operates".
As far as the 135 million allowed to be discharged into the lake daily, it is an incredibly small amount compared to the size of the lake. According to Wikipedia, the volume of the lake is 3.81 cu/miles of water. A quick search tells me 1 cu/mi =~ 1.1 trillion gallons. Okay, some more rough math gives us a total of about 4.2 trillion gallons in the lake of which 135M gallons is something like 0.000032% of the total volume.
So my point is that when the article throws a figure like 135M gallons at you with no context it seems huge. But when you look at it in context, 3 one hundred thousands of one percent of the total, I have a hard time imagining that has any measurable impact on the lake whatsoever. I'm sure the quoted resident that lives very near to the plant had noticed the warmth, but anywhere else on the lake?
On top of this, the plant is under strict scrutiny by the regulators, and they appear to be operating withing the limits outlined by said regulators. So if there is anyone to get mad at here it's not the plant operators, it's the Department of Environmental Conservation.
[+] [-] CarelessExpert|4 years ago|reply
Actually, the correct answer is: both.
There's a difference between what's legal and what's moral or ethical.
It is clear, at least to me, that emitting large quantities of CO2 into the air, and heated waste water into a lake, for the sole purpose of enriching oneself mining cryptocurrencies, is simply immoral. It is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons.
The regulations clearly do not adequately limit this kind of activity.
So we should be angry that the laws don't reflect our values.
And we should be angry that these folks are taking advantage of that fact to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us.
[+] [-] kens|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shkkmo|4 years ago|reply
Edit: My own stance would be that we should wait to until we have the data on how much warming is happening at the various layers of the lake and then use that data assess the regulations governing the power plant. In the meantime, we might look at bringing the regulations for disconnected power plants in-line with grid power plants.
[+] [-] mirekrusin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quadrifoliate|4 years ago|reply
I think it's kind of good that these absurd scenarios involving Bitcoin are driving people (in the larger sense of companies and governments) towards more environmental awareness.
If you think about it, the entire system is just as absurd as Bitcoin. Business pollute the environment we live in, and then get to brag to shareholders about "delivering value", "increased revenue margins", and "efficiency" that they later get rewarded by the stock market for.
The green company that makes a slightly lower profit, but takes care of the environment falls out of the index to be replaced by the polluter that either does the bare minimum, or actively breaks laws and treats fines as the cost of doing business. The market rewards rapacity over environmentalism.
Well, Bitcoin is even more efficient, it's directly burning coal and converting it into money that the market will also pay for!
The (hopefully) good outcome of this is that it will drive corporations and governments to take a breath, and formulate policies that prioritize the long-term health of the environment over short term priorities like jobs and the economy.
-------------------------------
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749932
[+] [-] rightbyte|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AnthonyMouse|4 years ago|reply
Is this a story if there is a carbon tax and as a result the profit-maximizing activity is to mine Bitcoin by building wind turbines?
[+] [-] swiley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistrial9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamben|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brippalcharrid|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|4 years ago|reply
I wouldn't mind if sugar manufacturers would have to buy 'sugar credits' for emitting sugar into the human population.
[+] [-] josu|4 years ago|reply
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/greenidge-generatio...
[+] [-] henearkr|4 years ago|reply
They are literally operating out of a gas plant...
[+] [-] eutropia|4 years ago|reply
A typical situation might involve a business or manufacturer taking power, raw materials, and labor to create something of value and sell it.
With bitcoin, anyone with sufficient capital can simply exploit natural resources and turn it directly into money. It's a capitalist dream: remove nearly all labor from the equation leaving only capital and land (land in the Georgist sense being natural resource like coal, oil, land, water, etc). I think in this way it exposes market failures faster than anything else since the efficiency of capital-infused actors is so high...
[+] [-] Nursie|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
Except it gets more difficult the more you (and others) mine.
[+] [-] quadrifoliate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlizzle30|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whywhywhywhy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|4 years ago|reply
What is the rationale for the suck in allowance being 4 million gallons a day higher than the discharge allowance?
[+] [-] etrautmann|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ww520|4 years ago|reply
With bitcoin mining, it's possible to run a solar farm to mine the coins while disconnected from the grid. I'd imagine it's quite competitive without all the interconnected fees.
[+] [-] engineer_22|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilamont|4 years ago|reply
https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/40458/202...
[+] [-] stretchwithme|4 years ago|reply
What is the energy consumption of armed trucks anyway? How much energy is required to build a bank branch?
Sure, the transaction charges are tiny with Bitcoin and storage is free. Is that an indicator of the differences in total energy consumption once the mining is over?
Also, what is the total energy consumed by coping with fiat currency's inflation? Probably should include that.
I think some hyperinflation events also contribute to wars happening. These use energy too.
[+] [-] UncleMeat|4 years ago|reply
The discussion of inflation and wars is just fantasy. Everybody in the world using BTC isn't going to end standing armies.
[+] [-] betwixthewires|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonfw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neonate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] me_me_me|4 years ago|reply
> Some locals say earth is flat
> Some locals say...
Who cares?