That plant was restarted in 2017 and has had a mining data center at least since early 2020.

Scale and expansion plans only became available on recent S4 filing. That’s new info. Tesla probably doesn’t want to contribute to the trend and hence the change of heart.

Agreed. And for the cynics: Tesla is gonna lose goodwill and clean energy cred if their brand is tied to stuff like this. It became increasingly clear Bitcoin is overall not in Tesla’s interests.

bitcoin was already unpopular with environmentalists when tesla started accepting it

A relatively small SPAC caused them to realize the obvious?

If that is the case, what was going on before?

I think it's probably indicative of a trend that Tesla doesn't want to incentivize any further. Tesla's mission is all about moving away from fossil fuels.

Prior, lean was towards renewable sources like hydro because of lower cost of surplus energy.