Upstate NY Bitcoin Miner Sues DEC to Keep Plant Operating
New York State has become the North Korea of the United States. It is narrow and parochial and devoid of freedom. If you operate a business in New York and you are not in a protected or favored class, or if your business does not bribe someone in the Democrat Party, you are in danger of losing that business. New York is aggressively hostile to any business remotely connected to fossil fuels. A “bitcoin miner” operating in beautiful Upstate NY, near the shore of Seneca Lake, uses a clean-burning (very small) natural gas power plant to power its 15,300 computer servers. The radical Democrats running the state, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, want it shut down and gone. Last October, NY antis were close to achieving their objective. But what’s this? The bitcoin miner is hanging tough and challenging the state in court. The facility is still online!
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New York State has become the North Korea of the United States. It is narrow and parochial and devoid of freedom. If you operate a business in New York and you are not in a protected or favored class, or if your business does not bribe someone in the Democrat Party, you are in danger of losing that business. New York is aggressively hostile to any business remotely connected to fossil fuels. A “bitcoin miner” operating in beautiful Upstate NY, near the shore of Seneca Lake, uses a small natural gas power plant to provide power for its 15,300 computer servers. The radical Democrats running the state, including Gov. Kathy Hochul, want it shut down and gone. They are close to achieving their objective. How did we fall this far?
It is beyond bizarre that the Sierra Club, which claims it defends the environment, works so hard to stop electric generating plants from converting from coal to natural gas. As we pointed out yesterday, gas-fired plants produce a small fraction of nasty pollutants like sulfur dioxide, compared with coal (see 
In reading through the story we share below, we feel dirty. Like we need a shower. New York State is deeply, deeply corrupt–at the highest levels. As in Gov. Andrew Cuomo. And every now and again, that corruption spreads to otherwise good projects, like converting a small coal-fired electric plant to burn natural gas. The Greenidge Generation power station in Yates County, located along the shoreline of Seneca Lake in the beautiful Finger Lakes region of upstate NY, is one such a project caught in the web of Cuomo’s corruption. Originally built in the 1930s, the operator of the plant, Atlas Holdings, wanted to convert it from burning coal to burning natural gas. After paying $120,000 to Andrew Cuomo’s campaign for reelection and more than $500,000 in payments to lobbyists, Atlas got a “fast track” approval and certain environmental exemptions from the Cuomo Administration. It’s a worthy project and should have been approved without such payoffs, but the project couldn’t get approved otherwise. Here’s the sordid story.