A Power Plant Expansion Tied to Bitcoin Mining Faces Backlash From Conservative Texans

  

GRANBURY, Texas—About 150 angry residents gathered in a conference center here on Monday for a public meeting hosted by the state environmental agency regarding Constellation Energy’s proposal to build a new 300-megawatt power plant alongside two existing power plants that border residential neighborhoods. 

But it was not only the power plant stirring up controversy. Marathon Digital, a Florida-based cryptocurrency company, operates a 300-megawatt Bitcoin mine on Constellation Energy’s property. For months, residents have complained about the constant noise emanating from thousands of fans cooling Marathon’s computers that run round-the-clock processing Bitcoin transactions.

The unyielding low-frequency sound waves have caused loss of sleep, and residents believe it may also be responsible for a host of unexplained health problems that have arisen since the Bitcoin mine opened in 2022. 

At the meeting, a representative from Constellation, two of the company’s environmental consultants and five officials from the Texas Commission of Environmental Quality responded to questions for about 50 minutes before listening to dozens of official public comments from residents of Granbury and neighboring towns.

“It’s not right. Y’all moved in on top of us. We didn’t move in on y’all,” said Nick Browning, looking directly at the Constellation Energy representatives as he delivered his remarks. For more than 30 years, the 81-year-old has lived about 800 feet from the property where Constellation Energy started building power plants in the early 2000s.

Constellation’s plan is to erect eight new turbines powered by natural gas to generate electricity. The company applied for air permits to release more than 796,000 additional tons of carbon dioxide per year. To sequester that amount of CO2 would require planting nearly 12 million trees and allowing them to grow for 10 years, according to EPA estimates. 

The permit also proposes increased emissions at the site for a host of other pollutants, including particulate matter, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide and volatile organic compounds. 

By their presence alone, the crowd of largely white elderly and middle-aged Texans—several donning Trump campaign attire—showed that fossil fuel power plants can face opposition from all political stripes, especially when tied up with loud Bitcoin mines. United by concern for how more air emissions coupled with noise pollution could impact their health, the community also expressed mistrust in the process itself, believing that the meeting was for show, and the permits will be approved. 

“What I’m hearing,” said Jim Brown of Granbury, “is as long as the government is OK with it, the public just has to submit.” 

Texas leads the nation in mining for Bitcoin, the largest and best known cryptocurrency. First devised in 2008 as an electronic payment system that cuts out middlemen like banks and credit card companies, Bitcoin transactions are managed by a decentralized network of Bitcoin users.

A Bitcoin, currently worth about $57,500, can be purchased with dollars at a Bitcoin exchange, like Coinbase. To buy something with Bitcoin, a buyer sends the currency from a digital wallet to the seller’s digital wallet.

For each transaction, a computer algorithm assigns a unique random identifying code, which must be guessed in order to validate the transaction. Bitcoin “mining” comes when companies like Marathon Digital operate powerful computers day and night running an endless series of random numbers before hitting upon, or guessing, the correct code. For every transaction successfully guessed, a Bitcoin miner receives a fee for helping maintain the network and keep it secure. 

At the same time that Bitcoin mining is growing and using enormous amounts of electricity, so is overall demand on the Texas state power grid. In an effort to bolster grid reliability, the Texas legislature passed a loan program, the Texas Energy Fund, designed to help more gas-fired power plants come online. 

Voters approved the program in a statewide election in 2023, and last month, the Constellation Energy expansion, known as Wolf Hollow III, was among more than a dozen selected projects that could receive taxpayer-funded loans if agreements are finalized. 

In a statement, Constellation Energy said that the power from its new addition “would be prohibited from directly serving industrial load,” such as Bitcoin. The company said it is “sensitive” to noise concerns, and that currently, no expansions of Bitcoin mining are planned. 

But Jackie Sawicky, a founding member of the Texas Coalition Against Cryptomining, told Inside Climate News that even if the new generation does not directly power Bitcoin, Wolf Hollow III would be replacing the energy capacity that Wolf Hollow II has set aside for Bitcoin, since both the mine and the new power plant have a capacity of 300 megawatts.

“I am worried about what’s going to happen as a result of these pollutants.”

Sawicky said that the Texas Energy Fund is “another handout” for the fossil fuel industry and by extension the Bitcoin mining companies that she said “ingratiate themselves on our grid.”  

Shannon Wolf, a Republican precinct chair for Hood County, where Granbury is located, said at the meeting that she voted for the ballot proposition to create the Texas Energy Fund. But she said she does not support Wolf Hollow III being built in an area “surrounded by ranches and farms and churches and an elementary school.”

“I am worried about what’s going to happen as a result of these pollutants,” Wolf said.

Another point of contention at the public meeting was how often Wolf Hollow III would operate, with the company saying it is designed as a peaking plant that only turns on when required to meet electricity demand. Constellation said the new power plant would be limited to operating only about 40 percent of the year. 

“It’s not really clear who’s going to monitor that,” Adrian Shelley, Texas director for the nonprofit Public Citizen, said at the meeting. 

Officials from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said no decision has yet been made on whether to grant a permit for the new plant. Residents who live closest to the project site are able to request a contested case hearing, a process in which an independent administrative judge hears community’s concerns and issues a recommendation on whether the permit should be approved. 

For nearby residents, there is a real fear that expansion could worsen their health. Karen Pearson, who lives across the highway from Constellation’s property, said her family, including her father Nick Browning, has experienced hypertension and hearing loss. Her mother, Victoria Browning, discovered a mass in her brain in July after a year of declining health, and Pearson said her doctors are baffled after determining that the mass is not a tumor. 

Pearson thinks the problems are environmental. “It’s about getting our health and quality of life back,” she said. “This is not just happening to us. This is happening to a whole lot of other people out here.”