Bitcoin mining helps save historic hydro plant

Mechanicville hydro plant gets new life | Albany Times-Union - Kathleen Moore: 

July 7, 2021 - "A hydroelectric plant with a historic claim to fame was nearly dismantled. Now it's been nominated for national engineering landmark status. 'We think this is the oldest renewable energy facility in the world that’s still running,” said Jim Besha Sr., CEO of Albany Engineering Corp., which owns the Mechanicville hydroelectric station [in Saratoga co., New York - gd]. They can no longer say it has been in continuous operation since it was built in 1897. But it’s working now, after years spent rebuilding a plant that was abandoned by National Grid.

"Despite getting the plant back to full power, there's not a lot of profit in running a plant that still uses all of the original 1800s machinery. That's why some of the plant's energy is now being used to produce bitcoin. 'We can actually make more money with bitcoin than selling the electricity to National Grid,' Besha said. Albany Engineering Corp. gets 3 cents per kilowatt hour when it sells energy to National Grid. Mining bitcoin, an electronic currency, makes three times as much money, Besha said. 

"'It’s the best (type of bitcoin mining) because we’re using renewable energy,' Besha said. “We’re just doing it on the side, experimenting with it. We're buying used servers.' He converts the thousandths of a bitcoin they make each week to cash, rather than holding onto it.... One bitcoin is ... worth about $33,000 [as of July 2021 - gd]....

"It all started in 1986, when National Grid asked Albany Engineering Corp. to refurbish and operate the plant, which provides power to two 2-megawatt transformers.... They signed a contract and he started the preservation work, while also applying for an independent license to operate the plant ... [which] finally was approved in 1993. Throughout that time, the plant was producing power that was sold to National Grid for a price under market rate, as agreed to in the contract. 

"But when Besha got the license, he learned that National Grid’s plans had changed.... 'National Grid called me up the next day and said, we’re not going to honor this contract. And if you don’t like it, take it to the judge,' Besha said. National Grid wanted to dismantle the old, small plant instead....

"Besha sued. It took 10 years to reach a settlement. But one of the first things Besha had done, when his company started work on the plant in 1986, was to get the plant listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That listing kept the plant from the wrecking ball while the case wound its way through the court system. Historic preservationists joined the fight, insisting that the structure be saved even if it couldn’t be used anymore. In the meantime, the plant itself began to fall apart. National Grid refused to buy the power during the dispute, and eventually Albany Engineering Corp. couldn’t run it anymore....

"In the end, National Grid agreed to give up the plant, pay for repairs to help with damaged incurred during the long court case, and to pay market rate for the power produced there, an increase over what they had contractually agreed to pay. On Aug. 6, 2003, Albany Engineering Corporation moved back in and surveyed the damage. They had to redo everything they'd done two decades earlier.... It took 30 days to get the plant running again and years to rebuild everything that had been damaged....

"Now, the plant has been nominated for landmark status in three different types of engineering: civil, electrical and mechanical. That will add to the National Register protection to keep the plant intact for, possibly, centuries to come, Besha said."

Read more: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Mechanicville-hydro-plant-gets-new-life-16299115.php

Mechanicville Hydroelectric plant in 1884, Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.

Destroying the environment for clean energy

The dirty business of clean power | National Post - Sarah Cox:

May 14, 2019 - This year’s nominees for the Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing [include] Journalist Sarah Cox [who] takes on the dirty business of clean power in Breaching the Peace: The Site C Dam and a Valley’s Stand against Big Hydro.

SC: "Large hydro dams are a hugely expensive and destructive way to generate renewable energy. They are neither 'green' nor environmentally friendly.... Among other impacts, the Site C dam will destroy habitat for more than 100 species already vulnerable to extinction, including bird, plant, butterfly, bee and mammal species. The Site C dam and its reservoir will also eliminate some of Canada’s richest farmland, ancient wetlands called tufa seeps, old-growth boreal forests and a living laboratory for scientists to study how species adapt to climate change.... As many as 30,000 songbirds and woodpeckers nest in the dam’s future flood zone....

"Just how 'clean' big hydro dams really are is called into question by many scientists. One study by U.S. scientists shows that reservoirs produce considerably more carbon emissions than anticipated. About 80 per cent of these emissions are in the form of methane, a greenhouse gas 34 times more potent than carbon dioxide....

"[T]here was a concerted lobby by construction trades unions to continue the Site C dam. The same unions donated generously to the NDP — to the tune of many hundreds of thousands of dollars — and they continue to form a key part of the party’s labour base. The unions directly lobbied the NDP government and held well-attended press conferences in Vancouver and Victoria to champion continued Site C construction....

"[T]he independent B.C. Utilities Commission (BCUC) would normally have examined the Site C dam to determine whether or not the project was in the public interest. The watchdog commission rejected the project in the 1980s.... B.C.’s Liberal government ... changed the law in 2010 to strip the commission’s oversight of Site C. When the NDP came to power in 2017, it ... sen[t] the project to the BCUC.... But, notably, it didn’t allow the BCUC to determine whether or not proceeding with Site C was in the public interest and the BCUC wasn’t given the most up-to-date financial information for the project....

"Two Treaty 8 First Nations have filed civil claims alleging the Site C dam and two previous dams on the Peace River unjustifiably infringe on their treaty rights.... Already, BC Hydro contractors are clearcutting 13 areas in the Site C project zone that the nations have identified as critical to maintaining cultural practices guaranteed to them in the treaty signed in 1899. Three of those areas fall within a corridor for a transmission line that cuts through ... two wetlands — Sucker Lake and Trappers Lake — where First Nations have hunted moose and trapped for millennia....

"It made financial sense to build large hydro dams in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s when there were fewer renewable energy options available and they were far more expensive. But ... Canada’s publicly owned energy corporations are largely stuck in an old model and haven’t kept up with the times. Plummeting prices for wind energy and other renewables, coupled with the abundance of shale gas, mean that power from expensive new hydro dams can’t be sold for anything close to what it will cost to produce it. So, in addition to their devastating impacts on the environment and Indigenous peoples, large Canadian dams are no longer economical....

"Ultimately, provincial ratepayers will suffer, or taxpayers — they are largely the same people. B.C.’s NDP government just bailed out the deeply indebted BC Hydro for more than $1 billion, for example, and that’s even before many more billions in Site C costs come due."

Read more: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/the-dirty-business-of-clean-power

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