Upstate NY Bitcoin Miner Wins! DEC Issues 5-Year Title V Air Permit
Sometimes the good guys win, and man, oh, man, it is sure sweet when it happens! We have a grin from ear to ear today upon learning the news that bitcoin miner Greenidge has won a four-year battle with New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), forcing the DEC to issue the company’s gas-fired power plant on the shore of Seneca Lake a Title V federal air permit to remain open and operational for the next five years. TOTAL VICTORY over the mouthy and wackadoodle environmental left that tried (and failed) to shut down this operation. Read More “Upstate NY Bitcoin Miner Wins! DEC Issues 5-Year Title V Air Permit”
This is too funny. Antis are up in arms over a bitcoin operation on the edge of Seneca Lake in Upstate New York that refuses to shut down. Even though they demand it. Bitcoin miner Greenidge Generation uses a clean-burning (very small) natural gas power plant to power its 15,300 computer servers at a facility on Seneca Lake in Yates County. The nutters on the enviro-left began carping and complaining about this plant back in 2021 (see 
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!
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.