Changes
Here's a closer look at that power plant on the opposite shore of Cayuga Lake, 4.2 miles north of where I was standing in Taughannock Falls State Park as the Google Earth line lies. This is a coal-fired plant built in 1955 with a 323-megawatt (MW) capacity, and it supplied a significant percentage of the electricity used in central New York for a little more than 50 years. The company that built it sold it in 1999, but the company that bought it went bankrupt 12 years later, so somebody else bought it at fire sale prices and came up with a plan to convert it from coal to natural gas.
This wasn't a unique plan. According to the internet, since 2011, about a third of the nation's 360-someodd coal-fired power plants have converted to natural gas in response to stricter environmental controls coupled with a sharp drop in natural gas prices thanks to advances in gas production technologies. (Think fracking.) The benefit to the world at large from this is that electricity is cheaper to produce with natural gas, natural gas production isn't as environmentally destructive (mostly), and natural gas power plants emit about 40% as much carbon per unit of electricity as coal.
The downside is that natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and though its impact on the environment is considerably less than coal, it's still not nothing, and in some places it can be pretty destructive. In short, the power doesn't come without consequence, and the people of New York wanted consequence-free power. The people living around the Finger Lakes protested the conversion, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo put a stop to it. He wanted New York to be free of fossil fuels by 2050, and he thought a natural gas conversion would slow that transition down. The result of the denied permits was that the Cayuga Lake Power Plant shut down for good in 2019.
So, does this qualify as an environmental win? I wouldn't be so fast. Even if you ignore what the removal of 323 MW from New York's electricity supply does to the grid and where the state might be turning to make up for the loss, there's the question of what happens to the plant itself. The company that bought this plant in 2011 has no interest in just leaving the plant here to rot, so they decided to convert the property into a server farm devoted to mining cryptocurrencies. You know, bitcoin and ethereum and other digital Ponzi schemes. They wouldn't be producing any power here, but a server farm consumes an enormous amount of electricity, and a shuttered power plant already has all the transformers and transmission lines a server farm needs to handle all that. The internet quotes local officials as saying this server farm would use enough electricity to power 16,400 homes. I work that out to a constant draw of about 20 MW.
This has inspired the people of New York to step back and say, "No, wait ... that's not what we meant," because if there's a more pointless use of 20 MW (12 of which would be produced by a natural gas plant just like what they don't have here) than the invention of fake internet money on an increasingly overburdened grid, I can't think of what it'd be. The last report I saw in my quick internet survey about this was published in January, though, and the last eight months have seen a precipitous collapse in the price of tulips ... er, I mean cryptomoney, so I don't know if this is still a thing or not.
Changes
Here's a closer look at that power plant on the opposite shore of Cayuga Lake, 4.2 miles north of where I was standing in Taughannock Falls State Park as the Google Earth line lies. This is a coal-fired plant built in 1955 with a 323-megawatt (MW) capacity, and it supplied a significant percentage of the electricity used in central New York for a little more than 50 years. The company that built it sold it in 1999, but the company that bought it went bankrupt 12 years later, so somebody else bought it at fire sale prices and came up with a plan to convert it from coal to natural gas.
This wasn't a unique plan. According to the internet, since 2011, about a third of the nation's 360-someodd coal-fired power plants have converted to natural gas in response to stricter environmental controls coupled with a sharp drop in natural gas prices thanks to advances in gas production technologies. (Think fracking.) The benefit to the world at large from this is that electricity is cheaper to produce with natural gas, natural gas production isn't as environmentally destructive (mostly), and natural gas power plants emit about 40% as much carbon per unit of electricity as coal.
The downside is that natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and though its impact on the environment is considerably less than coal, it's still not nothing, and in some places it can be pretty destructive. In short, the power doesn't come without consequence, and the people of New York wanted consequence-free power. The people living around the Finger Lakes protested the conversion, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo put a stop to it. He wanted New York to be free of fossil fuels by 2050, and he thought a natural gas conversion would slow that transition down. The result of the denied permits was that the Cayuga Lake Power Plant shut down for good in 2019.
So, does this qualify as an environmental win? I wouldn't be so fast. Even if you ignore what the removal of 323 MW from New York's electricity supply does to the grid and where the state might be turning to make up for the loss, there's the question of what happens to the plant itself. The company that bought this plant in 2011 has no interest in just leaving the plant here to rot, so they decided to convert the property into a server farm devoted to mining cryptocurrencies. You know, bitcoin and ethereum and other digital Ponzi schemes. They wouldn't be producing any power here, but a server farm consumes an enormous amount of electricity, and a shuttered power plant already has all the transformers and transmission lines a server farm needs to handle all that. The internet quotes local officials as saying this server farm would use enough electricity to power 16,400 homes. I work that out to a constant draw of about 20 MW.
This has inspired the people of New York to step back and say, "No, wait ... that's not what we meant," because if there's a more pointless use of 20 MW (12 of which would be produced by a natural gas plant just like what they don't have here) than the invention of fake internet money on an increasingly overburdened grid, I can't think of what it'd be. The last report I saw in my quick internet survey about this was published in January, though, and the last eight months have seen a precipitous collapse in the price of tulips ... er, I mean cryptomoney, so I don't know if this is still a thing or not.