Truly peculiar, one would think a hydro plant would fit perfectly with China's stated goals of reducing GH gas emissions from fossil fuels.
Are the plants too small and too remote to link to the national grid?
I was curious, too, about this. Some plants might be remote, though if they are for sale rather than being closed down, new management may be able to use them for more productive activities.
https://hbr.org/2021/05/how-much-energy-does-bitcoin-actually-consume
How Much Energy Does Bitcoin Actually Consume?
by
Nic Carter May 05, 2021
....
Another key factor that makes Bitcoin’s energy consumption different from that of most other industries is that Bitcoin can be mined anywhere. Almost all of the energy used worldwide must be produced relatively close to its end users — but Bitcoin has no such limitation, enabling miners to utilize power sources that are inaccessible for most other applications.
Hydro is the most
well-known example of this. In the wet season in Sichuan and Yunnan, enormous quantities of renewable hydro energy are wasted every year. In these areas, production capacity massively outpaces local demand, and battery technology is far from advanced enough to make it worthwhile to store and transport energy from these rural regions into the urban centers that need it. These regions most likely represent the single largest stranded energy resource on the planet, and as such it’s no coincidence that these provinces are the
heartlands of mining in China, responsible for almost 10% of global Bitcoin mining in the dry season and 50% in the wet season.
Another promising avenue for carbon neutral mining is flared natural gas. The process of oil extraction today releases significant amount of natural gas as a byproduct — energy that pollutes the environment without ever making it to the grid. Since it’s constrained to the location of remote oil mines, most traditional applications have historically been unable to effectively leverage that energy. But Bitcoin miners from
North Dakota to Siberia have seized the opportunity to monetize this otherwise-wasted resource, and
some companies are even exploring ways to further reduce emissions by combusting the gas in a more controlled manner. Of course, this is still a minor player in today’s Bitcoin mining arena, but back of the envelope calculations
suggest that there’s enough flared natural gas in the U.S. and Canada alone to run the entire Bitcoin network...
