They recycled old power plant. That is a huge CO2 offset, building new plant would had huge emmisions.

"Recycling" a coal power plant by turning it on again is one of the more tortured uses of that word I've seen recently.

It's similarly not a "CO2 offset": the offset is latent in the plant remaining dormant, or possibly being scrapped. By turning the plant back on, these miners have converted a CO2 offset into an ongoing source of CO2 emissions.

Renewables have been cheaper (in monetary and carbon) than running existing coal plants for a while. Even more so if you reuse the sites grid connection. So it still doesn't add up to me.

Clearly the couldn't sell energy before if they were about to shutdown, so there must be something different about the miners compared with their usual market, can't just be cheaper.

In the article they seem to be suggesting they couldn't buy renewable power in 2020 which seems odd, but no follow up detail on it, apparently they're phasing coal out in a year so it may just have been a short term thing.

Well, bitcoin mining is not going to be here forever. It could be time limited thing.

And knowing Montana, it is difficult to get electricity connection there.

False dichotomy; they could have done neither. NOT operating an old coal plant NOR building a new plant would have produced zero emissions.

Pretty sure the only way to have produced zero emissions was to not mine the bitcoin at all. Old or new plant, or consumption of power from the existing grid would have produced some level of emissions, although Montana tends to have pretty high renewable energy from hydroelectric.

> the only way to have produced zero emissions was to not mine the bitcoin at all

Yes, obviously. And what's the downside of that?

> Yes, obviously. And what's the downside of that?

And even more obviously—-Not mining/creating a desired product that would allow you to make a profit on your investment.

Not creating novelty waste is not a downside.