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The Hardin plant in southern Montana was on the brink of closing when a bitcoin ‘mining’ company bought it back to life.Anne Hedges
This story was originally published in the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Environmentalists Montana called it the “death watch.” Following years of financial losses, one of the handful of remaining coal-fired power plants in the state appeared doomed, its likely fate offering a small but noteworthy victory in the effort to avoid disastrous climate change. Then, a bitcoin mining company intervened to save it.
The Hardin generating plant, a 115 megawatt coal plant, is located just a dozen miles away from the historic site for the battle of Little Big Horn, in southern Montana. 2018 closing of this facilityDue to a lack in customers, the company was forced to continue operating on 46 days in 2020. “We were just waiting for this thing to die,” said Anne Hedges, co-director of the Montana Environmental Information Center. “They were struggling and looking to close. It was at the edge of collapse. And then this cryptocurrency company came along.”
In a deal struck in late 2020, Marathon, a bitcoin “mining” company, became the sole recipient of the power station’s electricity. It established an extended data center on 20 acres of land beside the facility that is packed with more than 30,000 Antminer S19 units, a specialized computer that mines for bitcoin. Such thirst for power is common in crypto—globally, bitcoin mining consumes more electricityNorway, home to 5.3 million people, is the country that’s most popular.
Hardin was roaring back to life as the bitcoin miners moved into last year. In the first nine months of 2021 alone, the plant’s boilers fired up on 236 separate days. Planet-heating emissions from the burning of Hardin’s coal soared too, with 187,000 tons of carbon dioxide emitted in the second quarter of last year, more than 5,000 percent more than was expelled in the same period in 2020.
Another 206,000 tons of carbon dioxide was emitted in the third quarter, a 905 per cent increase over 2020, according Environmental Protection Agency data. Hardin was operating at “near full capacity,” Marathon said in a December updateThe data center produced around 34 bitcoins on December 1.
“I was horrified to see it all happen, it was a terrible turn of events,” said Hedges, who took to visiting the plant and photographing the new data center as it took shape, fans perched on its roof to help cool the humming computer hardware. “This isn’t helping old ladies from freezing to death, it’s to enrich a few people while destroying our climate for all of us. If you’re concerned about climate change you should have nothing to do with cryptocurrency, it’s a disaster for the climate.”
Hardin is part of a wave of America’s “zombie” fossil fuel plants that have been brought back from the dead by cryptocurrency companies looking to feed the insatiable energy demands of their mining operations. China, formerly the epicenter of the bitcoin industry, effectively banished around half of the world’s currency miners last year and the resulting search for cheap power has seen companies eye struggling US power stations.
A mothballed coal plant in Upstate New York was converted to gas and power in 2020 large-scale bitcoin mining operation, a move that owner Greenidge Generation said is “bringing a piece of the world’s digital future” to the state. Eric Adams, the New York City mayor, said last week that he would accept his first bitcoin paycheck. He also criticized crypto mining’s environmental impact.
In western Pennsylvania, thousands upon thousands of bitcoin mining machines have been packed into shipping containers along with the Scrubgrass coal plant. The plant burns waste coal and was scheduled to close down before bitcoin’s pivot. In Kentucky, there is a new bitcoin facility. is being built next to the Big Rivers Electric Corporation, which owns and operates four coal-fired power plants.
This tactic, crypto firms argue, generates local jobs—Kentucky aimed to lure currency miners by Adoption of a law that exempts them from an electricity sales tax—and uses up excess power without straining the grid for homes and businesses. Critics argue that the massive electricity consumption required to sustain the virtual currency is fueling a climate crisis and now threatens a partial return of coal in the United States.
“Coal and natural gas power plants used for crypto mining that would otherwise be sunsetting as we decarbonize adds yet more carbon to the atmosphere in an era when we should be cutting such emissions,” said Benjamin Jones, a specialist in natural resource economics at the University of New Mexico. “Crypto’s continued or expanding use of fossil fuel sourced electricity imposes significant environmental economic costs on society.”
Jones said it is “troubling” to see that bitcoin’s already huge energy consumption This is increasing and that most of this is coming from fossil fuels, despite some efforts by mining companies to increase the amount of clean energy they use—Marathon, the company that draws power from Hardin, has struck a separate agreement in Texas to take power from a wind farm.
Even some early champions of bitcoin have balked at its energy use, with Elon Musk last year halting Tesla’s use of the crypto currency because, he said, the electric vehicle company is “concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel”. Uber, the ride-hailing company. he said it won’t accept crypto payments until the climate impacts are reduced.
The entrance to Hardin.
Anne Hedges
A little more than a decade back, it was possible for one computer to mine bitcoins at home. It required little electricity. The ultimate supply of bitcoins was limited and new bitcoins were awarded to those who could help validate transactions—the miners.
The validation process involves playing a huge guessing game, which gets more difficult with more miners. As bitcoin interest has increased, faster, more powerful computers packed in warehouses have a better chance to win the guessing game and be rewarded with several bitcoins. These bitcoins are currently worth approximately $42,000 each.
This race for bitcoin wealth gobbles up an enormous amount of electricity—Around 0.5 percent of total global consumption. Each 60 second, the energy used to mine bitcoin It would suffice. to power the average American household for 17 years, while the annual electricity consumption for mining would be able to power all kettles used to boil water for tea in the UK For 28 years.
Although climate activists have criticized this usage, bitcoin miners argue that it should be seen in a different context. Marathon’s chief executive Fred Thiel said that bitcoin uses more energy than the movement and use of physical goods all over the world. “I understand the desire for some people to point bitcoin mining as the big bad boy, but on a comparison with every other industry out there, it’s insignificant,” he said in an interview.
Thiel likens bitcoin mining to the transactions processed in data centers by companies such as Amazon and Google and claimed that the industry is moving quickly towards renewable energy—Marathon plans to phase out its use of coal next year—after finding its options were limited when miners had to quickly shift away from China.
“Go back to 2020, renewable companies weren’t offering energy to bitcoin miners,” said Thiel. “Very few people wanted to even deal with bitcoin miners in the energy world. So bitcoin miners spent their time searching for stranded assets. And so the only way for us to mine was to find stranded energy, which we did in finding the Hardin plant.”
It is still unclear if bitcoin will make a significant shift away from fossil fuels. However, it will likely be under increasing scrutiny for its desire to consume fossil fuel-powered electricity. “We simply don’t know how emissions from bitcoin mining will look in five to 10 years,” said Jones, the University of New Mexico professor. “It seems likely, though, it will to continue to be a major consumer of energy going forward.”
