![]() Electricity is a required input just like manual labour, screws, chairs etc. There's just no reason why we should subsidize some inputs but not others. I'm against all forms* of subsidized power for commercial purposes. "In 2019, the last year with available federal data, Scrubgrass emitted the equivalent of 371,000 tons of CO2 - the greenhouse gas footprint of 80,000 cars driving for a year." But with waste coal plants, there's always a trade-off. The Associated Press notes that the waste-coal plants are powered by those thousands of acres of abandoned (and pollutant-emitting) coal piles left behind by earlier coal-powered plants, finally remediating them into reclaimable land. Stronghold is buying another waste coal plant, Panther Creek Energy Facility in Carbon County, with plans to replicate its cryptomining data center there, and is eyeing a third. It received almost $2 million from power sales and more than $1 million from its crypto datacenter. During the first three months of this year, the trend reversed. ![]() In 2020, when the power plant seldom ran, Stronghold made more money from its Bitcoin operations than by selling Scrubgrass's energy to the grid. According to documents filed with the SEC, Stronghold is planning to operate 57,000 miners by the end of next year. Another 5,000 machines are scheduled to arrive next month. here are about 3,000 cryptocurrency miners packed into retrofitted shipping containers behind the power plant, most of them owned by Stronghold and some that belong to other mining companies that buy power from the plant. Today, Scrubgrass, an 85-megawatt blue box with a black smokestack in the hills of Scrubgrass Township, looks much like it did when it first opened in 1993 - except for the trailers filled with Bitcoin miners in the back. Some are taking mobile units into the oil fields, hooking up their machines to run on natural gas, a byproduct of oil product that would otherwise be flared. Bitcoin miners, in turn, are hyper cognizant of power prices and availability. The company said last month that it will develop a data center to mine digital currency that could use up to 300 megawatts, or 12% of the nuclear plant's capacity. Talen Energy, owner of the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station in Luzerne County, is doing the same. Energy Harbor, which owns the Beaver Valley Nuclear Plant in Beaver County, announced earlier this month that it will supply nuclear power to a Bitcoin-mining data center in Ohio. ![]() Spence started to look for other customers.Īlready, some power generators - finding they can make more money supplying electricity to Bitcoin-mining operations than selling it to the grid - are shifting focus. The plant couldn't just rely on the grid for revenue anymore, because the grid simply didn't need its power all that often. It was competing with cheap natural gas on the power grid and losing - endangering the 35 jobs at Scrubgrass Generating Station along with the effort to clean up millions of tons of leaching coal waste left behind by mining companies over the course of decades. While some bitcoin mining operations are now looking to nuclear power, the Associated Press reports, Bill Spence (and his company Stronghold Digital Mining) is creating crypto-mining hubs out of waste coal power plants.
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