"Bitcoin power plant" sounds like a square on an apocalypse-themed bingo card.
In the past, nearby residents weren’t necessarily enamored with the idea of a pollution-spewing power plant warming their deep, cold water lake, but at least the electricity produced by the plant was powering their homes. Sixty percent still does, Greenidge said, but the rest of the time, the turbines are burning natural gas to mint profits for the private equity firm Atlas Holdings by mining bitcoin.
Atlas, the firm that bought Greenidge has been ramping up its bitcoin mining aspirations over the last year and a half, installing thousands of mining rigs that have produced over 1,100 bitcoin as of February 2021. The company has plans to install thousands more rigs, ultimately using 85 MW of the station’s total 108 MW capacity.
Seneca Lake’s water isn’t the only thing the power plant is warming. In December 2020, with the power plant running at just 13 percent of its capacity, Atlas’ bitcoin operations there produced 243,103 tons of carbon dioxide and equivalent greenhouse gases, a ten-fold increase from January 2020 when mining commenced. NOx pollution, which is responsible for everything from asthma, lung cancer, and premature death, also rose 10x.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/bitcoin-power-plant-is-turning-a-12000-year-old-glacial-lake-into-a-hot-tub/