Why Re-Opening A Coal Power Station For Mining Is Bad For Cryptocurrency

According to CNET, a new initiative has been established by an Australian technology firms, ‘IOT Group’ and ‘Hunter Energy’, who are planning on re-opening an old coal burning power station on Australia’s east coast in order to produce energy for cryptocurrency mining. The power station will produce a private energy supply to companies who wish to mine cryptocurrencies and is expected to take around 12 months to re-generate. The power will not be supplied to the main grid, meaning the station can offer a very cheap power source to miners. This is obviously a very attractive proposal to people who currently mine vast amounts of cryptocurrency and of course to people who want to get a foot in the door and start mining themselves. Generally, though, I believe this is especially bad news for the cryptocurrency industry. There is already an awful lot of mediatisation of the carbon footprint of blockchain mining. Overall, the activity uses a colossal amount of power, with the majority of that power coming from finite resources, such as coal power stations, we shouldn’t be putting money into opening more coal power stations in order to keep blockchain mining costs down. We should be directing these resources towards new green energy initiatives that in the long run will save everyone money, they may just cost more to install initially. Perhaps this plan could see the coal station turned into a green power station over a period of time and maybe I am jumping the gun a little bit, I am yet to see evidence of this however. We are living through a technological revolution in which we can generate power from speed bumps in the road, from the wind, and from the sun. Actually, on that note, isn’t Australia notoriously quite a sunny place, why go with coal power when the option for solar is native to the area? Above all, we need to start talking about this more and more, yes, one more coal power station may only have a limited impact, but if we flipped the statistics over and had a look at how much change could be made by turning one coal power station into a solar farm (for example) could a green conversion become a more attractive proposal? Perhaps as cryptocurrency values grow and mining becomes a more financially sound activity, maybe we will see more green initiatives start up, to fix the wrongs that have been done by the relentless burning of our finite power resources.