Elon probably read about the retired coal power plant in New York state that's being retrofitted and brought back to life for the explicit purpose of mining bitcoin [0].

Honestly, this is really frankly terrible. Even though I knew that the power consumption of bitcoin miners was high before reading this story, this particular concrete example still moved me.

One could easily be tempted to think "sure it's power-intensive, but this will all move to solar/wind along with the rest of the grid"---but it's hard to square that with stories about dirty power being spun up explicitly for mining.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/private-equity-f...