By Philip Gillemot
On November 7, Governor Kathy Hocul's Department of Environmental Protection (DEC) granted an operating permit of five years for the Bitcoin mining facility at the Village of Dresden on the western shore of Seneca Lake. Also, as reported by readMedia on November 7, "Governor Hochul's Department of Environmental Conservation approved permitting for the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline. Finally, Gov. Hochul has announced that she is considering delaying implementation of the All-Electric Building Act, which passed in 2023.
These actions were prefaced by comments the governor made going back to the summer of 2024. Multiple business groups, according to a contemporaneous article in WaterFront had, "lobbied Gov. Kathy Hochul to defer or water down the law’s key mandates. Gov. Hochul seemed to be receptive to their efforts." “The costs have gone up so much I now have to say, ‘What is the cost on the typical New York family?’”, the governor stated in a July 18 TV interview. “The goals are still worthy. But we have to think about the collateral damage of these decisions. Either mitigate them or rethink them.”
Subsequently, according to a January 15, 2025, Spectrum News article, she delayed implementation of a cap-and-invest system that would disincentivize the use of fossil fuels and generate revenue for green energy projects. This delay means cap-and-invest would not be in place to generate revenue for the state's green energy mandates until at least 2027 and makes the likelihood that lawmakers would have to roll back the state's ambitious emission reduction mandates set under its climate law. As stated in that article, the governor defended her decision to delay the program's rollout and said that the state would need more pollution data to get the program correctly, saying, "I'm not letting these projects go unfunded." No word has since come from the governor's office on funding of the cap-and-invest program and may not come until the public announcement of the governor's proposed budget and state of the state address in early 2026.
More than three years after its air permit was denied by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), the Greenidge Generation cryptocurrency-mining facility on Seneca Lake remains in operation. Burning natural gas, it spews out huge amounts of carbon dioxide as waste gas into our atmosphere every day, worsening climate change, global warming, and its provoked climate disasters including hurricanes, storms, floods, heat emergencies, drought, fires, crop failures, loss of life, loss of communities, and economic loss. It had been appealing the loss of its air quality permit ever since and the state had allowed it to continue to operate while appealing, even before the new operating permit was granted in November. New York State signed legislation into law in 2022 that placed a two-year moratorium on the use of fossil fuel power plants for cryptomining while the DEC completed an environmental impact study of the industry. While delayed, a Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) on the Greenidge Bitcoin facility was recently released, and a public comment period on that study came and went.
The irony of this is that facility could mine cryptocurrency using less than one percent of its current electrical energy by switching to an alternative method. Greenidge "mines" Bitcoin by making multitudes of calculations with miniature computers through the Proof of Work (PoW) method. The alternative Proof of Stake (PoS) method makes the necessary calculations in a different way, and it requires only 0.2% of the energy that the PoW method uses. And thus, the amount of climate-warming carbon dioxide produced would be similarly reduced. Another leading cryptocurrency, Etherium, switched from the PoW method to the PoS method three years ago, has continued to be successful financially, and has been able to drastically reduce its environmental footprint. The Greenidge facility states that it also puts some generated electricity into the statewide grid when demand for electricity outpaces its generation from other sources. Note also that wind and solar are the cheapest ways to generate electricity; more costly is fossil fuel generation (including natural gas, coal, and oil), and the most expensive (and most time-consuming in plant permitting and construction) is nuclear.
It is unclear at this time how environmental groups will respond to the state allowing the Greenidge Bitcoin mining facility to continue to operate for another five years.
In reference to the Williams Northeast Supply Enhancement (NESE) pipeline approval by Governor Hochul's DEC, realMedia also reported that:
- Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado held a virtual press conference three days later with elected officials and advocates to demand that the Governor put New Yorkers first and rescind her decision. The decision to approve the pipeline came after the DEC denied this pipeline in 2019 and 2020. The Governor's decision came just days after President Trump demanded that she approve the pipelines, and several months after the White House bragged that Hochul "caved" to Trump on the pipelines in exchange for allowing the Empire Wind project to continue. (The status of a second regional natural gas pipeline, the Constitution, is unclear.) Neither the NESE or Constitution applications had been amended since they were repeatedly denied by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), which means they both still pose the same environmental threats to New York. The Constitution pipeline would threaten more than 250 waterways throughout Upstate New York, endangering sensitive habitats and wildlife populations that depend on healthy ecosystems, while the Williams NESE pipeline would stir up toxic contaminants in the New York Harbor that harm critical fisheries and other wildlife habitats.
Read the whole realMedia article here.
In a separate article dated November 13, CBS News in New York reported that Gov. Hochul delayed implementation of the All-Electric Building Law that was set to take effect on January 1, 2026. The article noted that Hochul signed the bill into law in 2023. It requires newly constructed buildings that are below seven stories have electric heat and appliances. The law would expand to include taller residential and commercial buildings in 2029. Hospitals and restaurants are exempted. Existing structures are not covered under the new law, only new ones. The article stated that attorneys for the state agreed to suspend the law's implementation until an appeals court rules on a lawsuit filed by various trade groups and unions who challenged it. A judge initially ruled against these groups in July and now they are appealing.
Read the whole New York CBS News article here.