YATES COUNTY, NY (WENY)--  Several organizations filed an article 78 lawsuit against the Town of Torrey in Yates County, along with Greenidge Generation LLC after the town approved a site plan for an expansion to a facility in Dresden, NY on November 16th. 

WENY News Reached out to Greenidge Generation CEO Dale Irwin for more specifics about the project and a response to the lawsuit but the company has not responded. 

Greenidge Generation is a former coal-fired electrical power plant that has converted to natural gas. Greenidge Generation currently houses 7,000 bitcoin mining machines, one of the largest bitcoin mining facilities in the U.S. Atlas Holdings, the current owner, bought the power plant in 2014 and converted the plant from a coal-fired plant to natural gas in 2017. 

Greenidge is currently operating at 20 megawatts (MW) of power to mine bitcoin and was recently approved by the Department of Environmental Conservation and the town of Torrey to expand and have the ability to operate at its full potential; 106MW. The Greenidge expansion project would include a data processing facility and site improvements that would require four new buildings. These new buildings would add to the already existing 7,000 bitcoin data mining machines. The existing Greenidge generating facility would provide these machines with power and cooling through the use of natural gas. The 106MW facility would also be able to mine around $50,000 worth of bitcoin every day.

According to the lawsuit, signed by a mixture of 25 organizations and individuals, this expansion could have a variety of environmental impacts. The lawsuit says 159,897,000 gallons of water will be withdrawn from Seneca lake daily for cooling and 190,000,000 gallons of superheated water that will be discharged into Seneca lake at temperatures that will affect aquatic life. For comparison, Cornell University's cooling system only pulls 46 million gallons of water from Cayuga Lake a day and this is a two million square foot facility.  The lawsuit also expresses concerns over an increase in noise levels and the chance to spawn algal blooms. 

Clifford Craft, Cornell Professor and Environmental Specialist, said harmful algal blooms have been popping up in the Finger Lakes region and North America for many years now and while they are a real concern there is no evidence of how or why they are occurring. 

 “ The bottom line is we do not really know why they are appearing all over and the usual suspects are the climates changing in a way that rain causes runoff in the landscape and the temperatures in the lake but there is no single answer,” said Craft. “We are probably going to have harmful algal blooms whether this facility is operating or not but if warm temperatures accelerate harmful algal blooms this is going to be contributing to that.”  

Another concern of the opposition is that this facility will be operating ‘Behind The Meter’; Under these conditions, the bitcoin mining operation will provide itself with power that can be used on-site without passing through a meter. Yvonne Taylor, Seneca Lake Guardian, believes this a result of a lack of regulation from the DEC.  

“Bitcoin mining is so new and no one really knows how to regulate it, it would be operating in such a way that it would not be counted as burning energy,” said Taylor. “ Therefore it is not being regulated by Governor Cuomo's Climate Protection Plan or the Public Service Commission for that matter.” 

Some argue that mining bitcoin is a waste of energy and that digital assets such as cryptocurrency and bitcoin are purely an environmental drain. Steven Novakovic, Finance and International business professor at Ithaca College said mining bitcoin is an energy-intensive enterprise that requires a large cooling system. 

“Bitcoin mining is very electricity consumptive, having seven thousand computers running at any given time is going to use a lot of electricity and these computers based on the amount of work they are doing generate a lot of heat,” said Novakovic. 

According to the University of Washington,” By the end of 2018, Bitcoin mining farms were projected to consume 0.05% of the world’s energy. These energy consumption levels superseded, or were equivalent to the net power consumption of entire nations such as Ireland (3.1 gigawatts) and Austria (8.2 gigawatts).”

Craft believes this expansion should have been looked over more thoroughly before being approved and that we have no idea the effect it could have on our environment. 

“I would be quite concerned, I mean I would want to see someone evaluate the effects on the water temperature, the effects on fish and the ecosystem in general,” said Craft. 

According to Bitcoin.com, Greenidge would be operating 24/7, 365 days a year, and said it will bring new jobs and tax revenue for local schools and government services to New York State and Yates County. 

Novakovic said bitcoin mining operations do usually introduce new jobs during the early building stages, but for the long term, they provide very little human capital.  

“A lot of it will be the upfront right, creating the infrastructure for the building and setting up the server farm and so forth, that is going to be the main human capital, once it is all in place, a lot of it is going to be self-managed,” said  Novakovic. 

 The facility plans to stay running every day of the year, which means if they mine $50,000 a day in bitcoin they would be bringing in around $18 million a year. Under previous ownership, AES Corporation had agreed to pay $1.1 million in taxes annually according to the Chronicle-express.

While this large bitcoin mining operation has the potential to kickstart the community in Yates county, the opposition is asking if the risks are worth the reward. 

The Seneca Lake Guardian is asking that organizations, as well as individuals, sign a petition to Governor Cuomo asking that air and SPEDS permits for Greenidge be revoked. Until then this project has been approved and could start any day now.