New York Bitcoin Miners Acquiring Power Plants, Sparks Community Opposition

The state of New York is dealing with a situation where bitcoin mines are consuming exorbitant amounts of power. Some local residents are being disturbed by the incessant noise coming from these facilities and the pollution that they generate. Erin Robinson, a sociology professor at Canisius University, shared her experience of living near a bitcoin mine close to the Canadian border in New York, saying, “I’m probably within a mile and a half of the facility, and I can hear it. It’s a low hum that just kind of sits in your ears.”

Bitcoin mining involves solving complex algorithms to confirm transactions on the blockchain network, and those who successfully mine a block of transactions are rewarded with bitcoins. As the network continually runs algorithms to process transactions, it requires massive amounts of computational power, which translates to high energy usage.

New York has become a hotspot for bitcoin miners due to the state’s low electricity rates, particularly in areas that are powered by hydropower. Some bitcoin miners in New York have even purchased decommissioned or underused power plants and connected them to their mining operations, running them constantly to power their computers and cool down their servers that emit a significant amount of heat.

In certain small towns in Northern New York, residents have witnessed bitcoin miners purchasing local gas plants, which have caused an increase in the overall greenhouse gas emissions due to the heightened operations at these power plants. The hum and noise from the servers and fans used to cool them down are disturbing to the nearby residents, and the excessive water consumption by bitcoin mines also raises concerns among experts.

Communities in New York have been fighting back against these bitcoin mines through various means, including local laws, moratoriums, and lawsuits. “Crypto mines exploit all of the distributed impacts in a way that has made it really hard to regulate and hard for communities to understand,” explained Mandy DeRoche, a deputy managing attorney with Earthjustice.

While the exact amount of energy consumption by cryptocurrency mines remains somewhat hidden, efforts are being made to collect data from major miners across the U.S. to gain a better understanding of the environmental impact of these energy-intensive operations. Under the former President Biden administration, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) initiated the collection of data from 130 commercial cryptocurrency miners in order to shed light on this issue, but this process is still ongoing.