A look at a fossil fuel power plant in NY that has been restarted to mine crypto, as NY considers a bill for placing a three-year moratorium on crypto mining
The lofty prices of cryptocurrencies have investors sinking money into electricity generation, risking a backlash Tweets: @the_moviebob , @ruskin147 , @carnage4life , @ayanaeliza , @davidfickling , @dnvolz , @bradyqg , @nkingofdc , @pekingmike , @libshipwreck , @bcappelbaum , @brianspegele , @alecstapp , @timcohn , @jyarow , @rjhintz , and @neerajka Tweets: MovieBob Productions / @the_moviebob : This is the literal opposite of what digitalization was supposed to do to these industries. F***ing people... https://www.wsj.com/... Rory Cellan-Jones / @ruskin147 : https://www.wsj.com/... Hurrah for crypto! Helping promote green energy....oh, wait.. Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : Defunct coal plants being reopened to mine #Bitcoin is reversing the progress we've made in switching to renewables across the country. It's getting so bad that New York State is considering a 3 year ban cryptocurrency mining due to emissions concerns. https://www.wsj.com/... Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson / @ayanaeliza : “In upstate New York, an idled coal plant has been restarted, fueled by natural gas, to mine #cryptocurrency. A once-struggling Montana coal plant is now scaling up to do the same.” But technology will saaaave us! 🙃 https://www.wsj.com/... David Fickling / @davidfickling : It's funny/infuriating that while @ARKInvest et al are spinning an impossible story about crypto mines as a key source of demand for low load-factor renewables, in the real world crypto mines are now a key source of demand for high load-factor fossil fuels. https://twitter.com/... Dustin Volz / @dnvolz : Across America, older fossil-fuel power plants are shutting down in favor of renewable energy. But some are getting a new lease on life—to mine bitcoin. https://www.wsj.com/... Brady Quirk-Garvan / @bradyqg : Not sure if it would be better for the environment to go buy a new Hummer and drive it across the state with the AC blasting and windows down or buy some bitcoin. Safe to say I won't be doing either anytime soon. https://twitter.com/... Neil King / @nkingofdc : Incredible. The equivalent of Argentina's entire power consumption is now going to mine for bitcoin. We're polluting the earth to solve math problems. https://www.wsj.com/... via @WSJ Mike Forsythe / @pekingmike : Investors in the Bitcoin miner restarting a Montana coal fired power plant include Blackrock and Renaissance Technologies per this super important @BrianSpegele piece. Didn't Blackrock's CEO make a pledge about not investing in coal just recently? https://twitter.com/... Librarianshipwreck / @libshipwreck : If you were reading a work of cyberpunk dystopian fiction and the author provided a literal description of Bitcoin you'd roll your eyes at the author for being too heavy handed... https://www.wsj.com/... Binyamin Appelbaum / @bcappelbaum : Reopening a coal-fired power plant for the purpose of mining bitcoin is just... wow. https://www.wsj.com/... Brian Spegele / @brianspegele : Across the country, old fossil fuel power plants are at risk of closing down as renewable energy grows. These bitcoin miners want to give them new life. My latest for @WSJ with @ceostroff https://www.wsj.com/... Alec Stapp / @alecstapp : The arguments for how crypto mining could benefit renewable energy make sense in theory, but in practice it seems Bitcoin at least is actually bringing fossil fuel power plants back online (h/t @Noahpinion): https://www.wsj.com/... Tim Cohn / @timcohn : The lofty prices of cryptocurrencies have investors sinking money into electricity generation, risking a backlash https://www.wsj.com/... Jay Yarow / @jyarow : We've all mostly accepted Bitcoin. But then you read a paragraph like this and you think, what are we doing here? https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/... Rich Hintz / @rjhintz : One site design is to produce at least 55 bitcoins/day by 1Q22, up from an average of 2/day using >100MW. 🙄 & “What is the difference between a data center processing for Amazon and a data center for bitcoin?” is an actual question? https://twitter.com/... Neeraj K. Agrawal / @neerajka : an important question might be “what was going to happen to this natural gas otherwise?” https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The story is a decade-long arc reaching a policy flashpoint: since at least [[a:933618|2018, Bitcoin speculators have been flooding into remote corners of New York chasing cheap electricity]], and the next step of that migration is now visible — idled fossil plants being brought back from retirement purely to feed mining rigs.
What makes this WSJ piece matter is that the state hosting the revival is simultaneously weighing a three-year moratorium on crypto mining, making New York the test case for whether states tax or ban mining's appetite for generation. The pattern isn't unique to NY: a Montana coal-fired plant has been restarted and scaled up for bitcoin with institutional money behind it — BlackRock and Renaissance Technologies are reported investors — and Kentucky has since emerged as a small mining powerhouse with an estimated CO2 footprint from crypto exceeding any other US state.
First-order effects
- The plant operator converts a stranded fossil asset into a revenue-generating mining site immediately, while New York lawmakers face direct pressure to pass or drop the three-year moratorium bill before more retired plants follow the same playbook.
Second-order effects
- If New York restricts mining, capital and rigs relocate rather than disappear — the Kentucky trajectory shows states courting displaced miners inherit both the jobs pitch and the emissions liability, as Kazakhstan's outage-driven loss of roughly 15% of global hashpower showed how mobile the industry is.
Third-order effects
- Mining becomes a buyer-of-last-resort for uneconomic fossil generation, entangling bitcoin economics with grid policy and forcing regulators to decide whether energy-to-compute conversion is industrial development or a carbon loophole — the question the NY bill frames as a three-year experiment.
The trend: Bitcoin mining is evolving into a financing mechanism that revives idle fossil-fuel generation, prompting the first wave of state-level siting regulation in the US.