On Friday, Greenidge Generation announced that the State Department of Environmental Conservation has agreed to renew its Title V Air Permit for the next five years. The renewal (read below) allows its Dresden facility to continue supplying power to the Upstate New York electrical grid while operating under emissions limits consistent with the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act.
The local International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) weighed in on the agreement. The Greenidge facility has long partnered with workers from the IBEW.
This permit agreement is about jobs,” said Roman Cefali, Business Manager of the IBEW Local 10. The Hochul Administration deserves credit for looking past the campaign of misinformation waged against Greenidge and the good, hardworking people of our union. We should be working, as this agreement does, to preserve and grow great union jobs for working-class upstate New Yorkers. This agreement also strengthens the upstate energy grid. By reaching a tough new permit deal, the State of New York is standing up for working-class families. I would like to thank Governor Hochul and her staff for their hard work protecting good-paying union jobs and achieving real, tangible environmental progress at the same time.”
Greenidge purchased the Dresden facility in 2016, converting a former coal-fired power plant into a natural gas facility, and began operations producing electricity for the local energy grid in 2017. In 2019, the company began a small pilot cryptocurrency program, and in 2020 began operating a novel cryptocurrency datacenter, using only electricity produced at the facility to operate the datacenter and causing no burden to the local energy grid.
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