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In the United States, home to about seven per cent of the world’s bitcoin mining, finding cheap power can be complicated. A few years ago, miners “descended upon” the city of Plattsburgh, New York, about a hundred and fifty miles north of Albany, which gets much of its electricity from hydroelectric dams on the St. Lawrence River. The power is relatively inexpensive, but, once Plattsburgh uses up its allotment, it has to purchase more at higher rates. Bitcoin mining drove up the cost of electricity in the city so dramatically that, in 2018, Plattsburgh enacted a moratorium on new mining operations.
Buying a generating station, as Greenidge Generation Holdings has done, is a way around the problem. Let others pay retail; Greenidge now gets its power “behind the meter.” The firm recently announced that it was going public, via a merger with a Nasdaq-listed company called Support.com, and boasted that it “expects to be the first publicly traded bitcoin mining company with a wholly-owned power plant.” In the announcement, Greenidge said that it was planning to more than double its bitcoin-mining operations in Dresden by the fall of 2021, and to double them again by the end of 2022. It further declared that it intends to “replicate its vertically integrated mining model at other power sites.”
To expand its operations in Dresden, Greenidge will have to burn more and more natural gas, thus producing correspondingly more greenhouse-gas emissions. The firm’s plans have sparked demonstrations in the Finger Lakes region. On Saturday, a hundred protesters marched to the gates of the plant.
