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An ongoing brawl over the carbon footprint of crypto miners escalated on Tuesday after New York state senators decided to effectively ban new bitcoin mining operations from tapping directly into the state’s carbon-emitting power plants.
The watered-down bill, which originally aimed to freeze all cryptocurrency mining hubs in New York City for up to three years, is heading to the State Assembly with a more personalized focus.
Now only potential mining companies on proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum looking to locate in carbon-producing power plants would be blocked. At least one of these factories operated by Greenidge Generation is online in upstate New York, but since it is already operating, it appears to be exempt from the bill.
Senators also dropped a three-year sunset clause, limited its scope to new projects and existing operations that seek to increase the number of their platforms, and stepped up calls to document the environmental footprint of miners at statewide. They removed any mention of cryptocurrency from the final bill.
The amendments may indicate where the broader fight over mining is going, however.
The annual global energy consumption for proof of work authentication is equivalent to that of the country of Sweden and exceeds the energy consumption of all global operations of big tech companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook combined, claimed The law project.
With more miners coming to New York and existing operations like the upstate Greenidges mining hub looking to expand, the bill says increased emissions from proof of work authentication could jeopardize state-wide efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
He also cited an environmental disadvantage of less talked about power plants: their use of water to cool equipment could damage nearby aquatic life by raising the temperature of the water in lakes.
The bill states the following:
The Ministry shall not approve a new application or issue a new permit under this section for an electricity generation facility that uses a carbon-based fuel and that provides, in whole or in part, the electrical energy consumed. or used behind the meter by a facility that uses proof of work authentication methods to validate blockchain transactions.
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