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Some locals say a Bitcoin mining operation is ruining one of the Finger Lakes

162 points by car 5y ago

dj_gitmo 5y ago
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. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/some-locals-say-bitcoin-mining-operation-ruining-one-finger-lakes-n1272938 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.
data_spy 5y ago
I hate it when people claim jobs or work trump citizens rights. A minor example of this, why should developers and construction sites close sidewalks and car lanes?
- frankbreetz 5y ago
  What is the alternative? Sometimes you must close a road or sidewalk in order to perform maintenance. This is an out of touch stance.
  - data_spy 5y ago
    The alternative, the business pays a fee per day for lane and sidewalk closures. I guarantee they will close the lanes and sidewalks less often and for shorter durations.
    - undfg 5y ago
      I don't know how it is where you live, but that's the way it works here. You pay a daily fee.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        Because the fee isn't paid to them they don't notice or care. Much of the "solutions" provided for apparent existing problems already exist. Some kind of analogy to the Dunning-Kreuger effect is going on - any problem I don't understand is simple.
    - burkaman 5y ago
      This is already how it works. Also, in the process of applying for a permit, the city will make sure your construction plan is reasonable and you're doing everything you can to minimize impact to the public. I think anywhere in the world with a functioning local government will be similar.
      - bhickey 5y ago
        > anywhere in the world with a functioning local government will be similar. Boston does not have a functioning local government. A developer in my old neighborhood blocked a sidewalk for three years without a permit. Public works issued them one $50 fine. The same developer also abandoned the site in an effort to pressure the zoning board to allow them to add floors to their plan.
        notJim 5y ago
        Most places in the US do not have functioning governments, to be fair, including at the national level.
- kristopolous 5y ago
  The jobs argument can be made for just about anything. People use it when nothing else is valid. Everything creates jobs. Car crashes, wild fires, drug dealing, sex trafficking, aerial bombing campaigns, it means nothing. Exxon Valdez was the greatest job creator of any ship that sailed that year. When people say "jobs jobs jobs" just stop listening. Seriously, just walk away. They're saying it's of no value whatsoever and they have to fall back on perennial truisms
  - frankbreetz 5y ago
    The argument for closing roads and sidewalks is not "jobs, jobs, jobs" It is "You must perform on going maintenance of our infrastructure, or it is going to crumble and become unusable" Do you think people just close roads so someone has a job?
    - kristopolous 5y ago
      Nah. Closing roads is perfectly valid. Infrastructure is super important. Large construction can be dangerous and it's a great idea to block the public from hazardous risks (like moving giant beams suspended from cranes, an accident of that slipping and killing people sounds like a legitimate risk) I live in LA, roads get shut down for silly TV shows all the time and that's fine with me as well. Entertainment is important for people's happiness. Jobs arguments are scams though
NickM 5y ago
Ars Technica did a great piece about this a couple months ago: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-firm-revives-zombie-fossil-fuel-power-plant-to-mine-bitcoin/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f... 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 5y ago
  > 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.
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    I don't get why the law separates between connected and disconnected power plants? Seems a lot less simple than just saying "everyone who pollutes pays x". This is also why carbon tax is gonna be a disappointment. There are way too many rules surrounding it, when really there should just be one carbon budget that every firm can try to buy some of on equal terms.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      The law likely didn't consider disconnected power plants, as why would such a thing exist? I guess the only reason before bitcoin is a self-contained power plant to run a self-contained facility, and even those (like a datacenter) are often grid tied with the power plant as a backup.
sadfasf122 5y ago
lol
quadrifoliate 5y ago
(Ported from the duped thread [1]) 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749932
- mistrial9 5y ago
  +1 here on this analysis ; four or five decades of stupid capital investment and population explosion plus plastics -- no contest ! I literally mean this.
- rightbyte 5y ago
  Bitcoin has commodified wasting resources for money.
  - mirekrusin 5y ago
    Proof-of-Waste (PoW) is quite accurate.
  - ohhhhhh 5y ago
    Saying it's a waste is like putting a moral qualifier on the use of energy - and for the purpose and affect that this decentralized monetary system can have on the world is definitely worth it in my eyes. People dont make a fuss about using 2 clothes dryers and 24/7 christmas lights that use more energy, but hey that's an approved use of energy.
yodelshady 5y ago
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.
- not2b 5y ago
  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.
  - avisser 5y ago
    The Finger Lakes are famously deep as well. Seneca averages 291' with a max depth of 618'
  - slownews45 5y ago
    If this is a critical issue it probably wouldn't be overly difficult to spend some energy to pump in from a colder / deeper part of the lake if that is the concern, then heat and dump on the top. May be actually COLDER still than existing surface waters.
    - not2b 5y ago
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
Changing the temperature of the water that drastically is potentially lethal to all sorts of species. It screws up when and where they breed, lay eggs, have access to cool water to cool off in, what plants grow (that is part of a complex ecological web), and might provide an opportunity for growth of harmful bacteria. Here's an article from November about the plant and trout fishing. https://fingerlakes1.com/2020/11/14/fish-arent-biting-on-seneca/ https://fingerlakes1.com/2020/11/14/fish-arent-biting-on-sen...
eutropia 5y ago
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...
- Nursie 5y ago
  It certainly reinforces that externalities are not priced in to the current energy markets!
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  (moved to the other thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749247)
  - brabel 5y ago
    > Bitcoin is driving people towards more environmental awareness. WHAT? What makes you think Bitcoin is driving anything other than speculation and greed?
    - quadrifoliate 5y ago
      That was not well phrased, I apologize. The sentence should have been "These absurd scenarios involving Bitcoin are driving people towards more environmental awareness". Pretty much all the mentions of Bitcoin I have heard within my social circle have been about the environmental impact. People think it's absurd that we are literally converting energy into money! Does it sound more plausible / correct with that phrasing?
      - 5y ago
thedudeabides5 5y ago
Don't worry folks, uncle @jack says bitcoin is good for the environment so nothing to see here
- jandrese 5y ago
  Bitcoin is many things, but "good for the environment" has never been one of them. Staggering inefficiency has always been a fundamental part of the design. Back when it was a nerd curiosity nobody cared too much, but now that it is a major industry the pollution can no longer be overlooked.
  - coolspot 5y ago
    OP refers to Twitter CEO (@jack), who said that “Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy” https://twitter.com/jack/status/1384903902907314176?s=21 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1384903902907314176?s=21
- wesleywt 5y ago
  I wonder if you drove your car today. Or bought apples from South America.
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    Bitcoin is explicitly designed to be worse and worse the more people buy into it. Say what you want about importing apples but they arnt explicitly designed to eat all available power and hardware as a stated goal.
    - rspeele 5y ago
      What if they were though? There are 6.25 apples farmed every 10 minutes. Adding more orchards does not produce more apples or make the apples better, but whoever builds the biggest orchard has the highest chance of getting the 6.25 apples to grow on their property. The apple orchards now consume 1/200th of the earth's arable land. An apple is $33,000 and not even very good to eat, so mostly they are traded symbolically on exchanges with little reason to actually take delivery.
xwdv 5y ago
In the old days at least we got something of value to society in exchange for pollution. Now we get nothing.
silexia 5y ago
Proof of work cryptocurrency is an absolute environmental disaster and should be banned.
jlizzle30 5y ago
Why does this article not have the temperature change of the water?
- whywhywhywhy 5y ago
  Because journalism. Can't let data get in the way of a good story.
iamben 5y ago
Buying carbon credits is like a corporate greenwashing get out jail free card, isn't it? "Hey, no need to hate us! We're buying carbon credits!"
- brippalcharrid 5y ago
  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.
- scotty79 5y ago
  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.
  - nightski 5y ago
    They do. The government controls all sugar production in the U.S. They control how much can be grown, imported, and exported. It is a very unique commodity in that sense. I've worked in the industry for 10 years now.
  - lozenge 5y ago
    But it doesn't use the actual cost of CO2 emissions. Nor does it "balance out" emissions by removing CO2 in one place and allowing CO2 emissions in another place. It actually works off schemes that reduce the amount of CO2 emitted compared to a hypothetical. So, it's like me saying I've made "savings" by not buying a coffee every day, even if I never actually bought coffee in the past.
  - ErikVandeWater 5y ago
    Putting "actual" in quotes. Estimating the cost is insanely difficult.
    - 5y ago
tzs 5y ago
> 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?
- etrautmann 5y ago
  Evaporation?
  - tzs 5y ago
    That seems like a reasonable explanation for why they might have less water to discharge than they sucked in, but I don't understand why it would be written into the limits of what they are allowed to suck out and discharge. If they were to take 139 MG one day and only 2 MG were lost to evaporation, so that they had 137 MG left over, I fail to see the logic in saying that they can only put 135 MG of that back into the lake. That's effectively saying that if they take their limit of 139 MG per day, then they are required to net drain the lake by 4 MG per day. I'd have expected the limits to be of the form: You can take up to X per day, you can put back up to what you take, and you must put back enough so that the net taking for that day is less than T.
djrogers 5y ago
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?
jonfw 5y ago
Hot tubs are pretty warm. That'd be an extraordinary amount of energy. Would be interested to see data, measuring water temperature is pretty easy
40four 5y ago
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.
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  > 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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/ByenE https://archive.is/ByenE
deviledeggs 5y ago
Hear me out, I don't buy this. NY would have never approved operating a power plant that did such damage to the lake. 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 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) 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 5y ago
  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_FAQ-2020-06-17_0.pdf https://fcs.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/2020-06/Final_FA...
  - deviledeggs 5y ago
    It's not different :) Water can absorb enormous amount of energy. And releases huge amounts as it evaporates. And the lake is in contact with massive land surface that also absorbs ton of energy. The deeper parts of Seneca lake are isothermal with regional ground temperature, so there's clearly no problem with heat dissipation
- henearkr 5y ago
  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.
ww520 5y ago
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.
- engineer_22 5y ago
  How can you sell solar power to local users without connecting to the grid?
  - ww520 5y ago
    They built their own power line directly to the users.
josu 5y ago
Not sure about the lake temperature, but the energy company just announced that all their bitcoin mining operations are carbon neutral. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/greenidge-generation-bitcoin-mining-operation-to-be-carbon-neutral-in-2021-and-beyond-301291782.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/greenidge-generatio...
- henearkr 5y ago
  Sounds like a joke. They are literally operating out of a gas plant...
ilamont 5y ago
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. https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/40458/20200128/cryptocurrency-firm-in-plattsburgh-fights-1-million-electric-charge https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/40458/202...
stretchwithme 5y ago
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.
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  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.
  - stretchwithme 5y ago
    It hasn't replaced it. But it does compete with it for some things. Payments with BTC certainly isn't competitive. But that probably won't last. Maybe we'll still need branches. Not everybody can deal with the security required for crypto and there will probably be companies that help people treat it like a regular bank. Inflation is a real issue and Hitler came to power after the hyperinflation in the Weimar republic. Fiat made that possible. But Germany still would have had to pay the WW1 reparations somehow. With very high taxation probably. But the hyperinflation happens after multiple years of expanding the currency too much, often with little impact for several years. That can destroy confidence in government in a way that consistently high but stable taxation might not.
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      Heard it here first. Fiat money caused the holocaust. Hyperinflation is not the result of monetary policy. Hyperinflation is the result of near total collapse of systems. BTC is absolutely not immune to hyperinflation. That's just what happens when the price of some currency tanks rapidly as people lose all trust in its stability. The mining cap does not prevent the collapse of BTC as a currency or the collapse of states that use it. Not even a little.
betwixthewires 5y ago
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."
plank_time 5y ago
Biden needs to make Bitcoin illegal. It would instantly increase electricity capacity in many parts of the US and it would stop a large part of the money laundering that is going on in the US including ransom ware. Why they haven’t yet made it illegal but made online poker illegal is beyond me.
me_me_me 5y ago
> Some locals say Bitcoin is great > Some locals say earth is flat > Some locals say... Who cares?

162 points by car 5y ago

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. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/some-locals-say-bitcoin-mining-operation-ruining-one-finger-lakes-n1272938 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.

data_spy 5y ago

I hate it when people claim jobs or work trump citizens rights. A minor example of this, why should developers and construction sites close sidewalks and car lanes?

frankbreetz 5y ago
What is the alternative? Sometimes you must close a road or sidewalk in order to perform maintenance. This is an out of touch stance.
- data_spy 5y ago
  The alternative, the business pays a fee per day for lane and sidewalk closures. I guarantee they will close the lanes and sidewalks less often and for shorter durations.
  - undfg 5y ago
    I don't know how it is where you live, but that's the way it works here. You pay a daily fee.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      Because the fee isn't paid to them they don't notice or care. Much of the "solutions" provided for apparent existing problems already exist. Some kind of analogy to the Dunning-Kreuger effect is going on - any problem I don't understand is simple.
  - burkaman 5y ago
    This is already how it works. Also, in the process of applying for a permit, the city will make sure your construction plan is reasonable and you're doing everything you can to minimize impact to the public. I think anywhere in the world with a functioning local government will be similar.
    - bhickey 5y ago
      > anywhere in the world with a functioning local government will be similar. Boston does not have a functioning local government. A developer in my old neighborhood blocked a sidewalk for three years without a permit. Public works issued them one $50 fine. The same developer also abandoned the site in an effort to pressure the zoning board to allow them to add floors to their plan.
      - notJim 5y ago
        Most places in the US do not have functioning governments, to be fair, including at the national level.
kristopolous 5y ago
The jobs argument can be made for just about anything. People use it when nothing else is valid. Everything creates jobs. Car crashes, wild fires, drug dealing, sex trafficking, aerial bombing campaigns, it means nothing. Exxon Valdez was the greatest job creator of any ship that sailed that year. When people say "jobs jobs jobs" just stop listening. Seriously, just walk away. They're saying it's of no value whatsoever and they have to fall back on perennial truisms
- frankbreetz 5y ago
  The argument for closing roads and sidewalks is not "jobs, jobs, jobs" It is "You must perform on going maintenance of our infrastructure, or it is going to crumble and become unusable" Do you think people just close roads so someone has a job?
  - kristopolous 5y ago
    Nah. Closing roads is perfectly valid. Infrastructure is super important. Large construction can be dangerous and it's a great idea to block the public from hazardous risks (like moving giant beams suspended from cranes, an accident of that slipping and killing people sounds like a legitimate risk) I live in LA, roads get shut down for silly TV shows all the time and that's fine with me as well. Entertainment is important for people's happiness. Jobs arguments are scams though

NickM 5y ago

Ars Technica did a great piece about this a couple months ago: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-firm-revives-zombie-fossil-fuel-power-plant-to-mine-bitcoin/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f... 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 5y ago
> 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.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  I don't get why the law separates between connected and disconnected power plants? Seems a lot less simple than just saying "everyone who pollutes pays x". This is also why carbon tax is gonna be a disappointment. There are way too many rules surrounding it, when really there should just be one carbon budget that every firm can try to buy some of on equal terms.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    The law likely didn't consider disconnected power plants, as why would such a thing exist? I guess the only reason before bitcoin is a self-contained power plant to run a self-contained facility, and even those (like a datacenter) are often grid tied with the power plant as a backup.

sadfasf122 5y ago

lol

quadrifoliate 5y ago

(Ported from the duped thread [1]) 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749932

mistrial9 5y ago
+1 here on this analysis ; four or five decades of stupid capital investment and population explosion plus plastics -- no contest ! I literally mean this.
rightbyte 5y ago
Bitcoin has commodified wasting resources for money.
- mirekrusin 5y ago
  Proof-of-Waste (PoW) is quite accurate.
- ohhhhhh 5y ago
  Saying it's a waste is like putting a moral qualifier on the use of energy - and for the purpose and affect that this decentralized monetary system can have on the world is definitely worth it in my eyes. People dont make a fuss about using 2 clothes dryers and 24/7 christmas lights that use more energy, but hey that's an approved use of energy.

yodelshady 5y ago

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.

not2b 5y ago
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.
- avisser 5y ago
  The Finger Lakes are famously deep as well. Seneca averages 291' with a max depth of 618'
- slownews45 5y ago
  If this is a critical issue it probably wouldn't be overly difficult to spend some energy to pump in from a colder / deeper part of the lake if that is the concern, then heat and dump on the top. May be actually COLDER still than existing surface waters.
  - not2b 5y ago

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

Changing the temperature of the water that drastically is potentially lethal to all sorts of species. It screws up when and where they breed, lay eggs, have access to cool water to cool off in, what plants grow (that is part of a complex ecological web), and might provide an opportunity for growth of harmful bacteria. Here's an article from November about the plant and trout fishing. https://fingerlakes1.com/2020/11/14/fish-arent-biting-on-seneca/ https://fingerlakes1.com/2020/11/14/fish-arent-biting-on-sen...

eutropia 5y ago

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...

Nursie 5y ago
It certainly reinforces that externalities are not priced in to the current energy markets!
quadrifoliate 5y ago
(moved to the other thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27749247)
- brabel 5y ago
  > Bitcoin is driving people towards more environmental awareness. WHAT? What makes you think Bitcoin is driving anything other than speculation and greed?
  - quadrifoliate 5y ago
    That was not well phrased, I apologize. The sentence should have been "These absurd scenarios involving Bitcoin are driving people towards more environmental awareness". Pretty much all the mentions of Bitcoin I have heard within my social circle have been about the environmental impact. People think it's absurd that we are literally converting energy into money! Does it sound more plausible / correct with that phrasing?
    - 5y ago

thedudeabides5 5y ago

Don't worry folks, uncle @jack says bitcoin is good for the environment so nothing to see here

jandrese 5y ago
Bitcoin is many things, but "good for the environment" has never been one of them. Staggering inefficiency has always been a fundamental part of the design. Back when it was a nerd curiosity nobody cared too much, but now that it is a major industry the pollution can no longer be overlooked.
- coolspot 5y ago
  OP refers to Twitter CEO (@jack), who said that “Bitcoin incentivizes renewable energy” https://twitter.com/jack/status/1384903902907314176?s=21 https://twitter.com/jack/status/1384903902907314176?s=21
wesleywt 5y ago
I wonder if you drove your car today. Or bought apples from South America.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  Bitcoin is explicitly designed to be worse and worse the more people buy into it. Say what you want about importing apples but they arnt explicitly designed to eat all available power and hardware as a stated goal.
  - rspeele 5y ago
    What if they were though? There are 6.25 apples farmed every 10 minutes. Adding more orchards does not produce more apples or make the apples better, but whoever builds the biggest orchard has the highest chance of getting the 6.25 apples to grow on their property. The apple orchards now consume 1/200th of the earth's arable land. An apple is $33,000 and not even very good to eat, so mostly they are traded symbolically on exchanges with little reason to actually take delivery.

xwdv 5y ago

In the old days at least we got something of value to society in exchange for pollution. Now we get nothing.

silexia 5y ago

Proof of work cryptocurrency is an absolute environmental disaster and should be banned.

jlizzle30 5y ago

Why does this article not have the temperature change of the water?

whywhywhywhy 5y ago
Because journalism. Can't let data get in the way of a good story.

iamben 5y ago

Buying carbon credits is like a corporate greenwashing get out jail free card, isn't it? "Hey, no need to hate us! We're buying carbon credits!"

brippalcharrid 5y ago
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.
scotty79 5y ago
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.
- nightski 5y ago
  They do. The government controls all sugar production in the U.S. They control how much can be grown, imported, and exported. It is a very unique commodity in that sense. I've worked in the industry for 10 years now.
- lozenge 5y ago
  But it doesn't use the actual cost of CO2 emissions. Nor does it "balance out" emissions by removing CO2 in one place and allowing CO2 emissions in another place. It actually works off schemes that reduce the amount of CO2 emitted compared to a hypothetical. So, it's like me saying I've made "savings" by not buying a coffee every day, even if I never actually bought coffee in the past.
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  Putting "actual" in quotes. Estimating the cost is insanely difficult.
  - 5y ago

tzs 5y ago

> 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?

etrautmann 5y ago
Evaporation?
- tzs 5y ago
  That seems like a reasonable explanation for why they might have less water to discharge than they sucked in, but I don't understand why it would be written into the limits of what they are allowed to suck out and discharge. If they were to take 139 MG one day and only 2 MG were lost to evaporation, so that they had 137 MG left over, I fail to see the logic in saying that they can only put 135 MG of that back into the lake. That's effectively saying that if they take their limit of 139 MG per day, then they are required to net drain the lake by 4 MG per day. I'd have expected the limits to be of the form: You can take up to X per day, you can put back up to what you take, and you must put back enough so that the net taking for that day is less than T.

djrogers 5y ago

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?

jonfw 5y ago

Hot tubs are pretty warm. That'd be an extraordinary amount of energy. Would be interested to see data, measuring water temperature is pretty easy

40four 5y ago

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.

CarelessExpert 5y ago
> 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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/ByenE https://archive.is/ByenE

deviledeggs 5y ago

Hear me out, I don't buy this. NY would have never approved operating a power plant that did such damage to the lake. 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 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) 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 5y ago
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_FAQ-2020-06-17_0.pdf https://fcs.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/2020-06/Final_FA...
- deviledeggs 5y ago
  It's not different :) Water can absorb enormous amount of energy. And releases huge amounts as it evaporates. And the lake is in contact with massive land surface that also absorbs ton of energy. The deeper parts of Seneca lake are isothermal with regional ground temperature, so there's clearly no problem with heat dissipation
henearkr 5y ago
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.

ww520 5y ago

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.

engineer_22 5y ago
How can you sell solar power to local users without connecting to the grid?
- ww520 5y ago
  They built their own power line directly to the users.

josu 5y ago

Not sure about the lake temperature, but the energy company just announced that all their bitcoin mining operations are carbon neutral. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/greenidge-generation-bitcoin-mining-operation-to-be-carbon-neutral-in-2021-and-beyond-301291782.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/greenidge-generatio...

henearkr 5y ago
Sounds like a joke. They are literally operating out of a gas plant...

ilamont 5y ago

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. https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/40458/20200128/cryptocurrency-firm-in-plattsburgh-fights-1-million-electric-charge https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/40458/202...

stretchwithme 5y ago

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.

UncleMeat 5y ago
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.
- stretchwithme 5y ago
  It hasn't replaced it. But it does compete with it for some things. Payments with BTC certainly isn't competitive. But that probably won't last. Maybe we'll still need branches. Not everybody can deal with the security required for crypto and there will probably be companies that help people treat it like a regular bank. Inflation is a real issue and Hitler came to power after the hyperinflation in the Weimar republic. Fiat made that possible. But Germany still would have had to pay the WW1 reparations somehow. With very high taxation probably. But the hyperinflation happens after multiple years of expanding the currency too much, often with little impact for several years. That can destroy confidence in government in a way that consistently high but stable taxation might not.
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    Heard it here first. Fiat money caused the holocaust. Hyperinflation is not the result of monetary policy. Hyperinflation is the result of near total collapse of systems. BTC is absolutely not immune to hyperinflation. That's just what happens when the price of some currency tanks rapidly as people lose all trust in its stability. The mining cap does not prevent the collapse of BTC as a currency or the collapse of states that use it. Not even a little.

betwixthewires 5y ago

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."

plank_time 5y ago

Biden needs to make Bitcoin illegal. It would instantly increase electricity capacity in many parts of the US and it would stop a large part of the money laundering that is going on in the US including ransom ware. Why they haven’t yet made it illegal but made online poker illegal is beyond me.

me_me_me 5y ago

> Some locals say Bitcoin is great > Some locals say earth is flat > Some locals say... Who cares?