Coal Power Station Recommissioned Exclusively for Bitcoin Mining

A coal power station is Sydney is being brought back from the dead, exclusively to sell cheap electricity to blockchain mining companies.

This is arguably a regressive move from a resource allocation standpoint.

Blockchain enthusiasts often cite that crypto-mining can be used as a grid load balance in areas of high renewable energy and hydro power. They argue that mining can take up the slack from renewable energy power plants that would otherwise have to be throttled back and wasted during times of excess.

This has been used as a decent counter argument against the view that proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains are not sustainable and drain power from the grid that would otherwise have a more important use. But developments like this one in Sydney seem to cancel out those kinds of argument.

It is certainly questionable whether Blockchain, at this stage, has enough of a purpose / contribution to society to justify this kind of exclusive and incremental use of finite resources.

Proof of Stake is eventually coming for some blockchains, like Ethereum, but there are likely to be a number of significant blockchains that will stay on PoW forever, Bitcoin being one of them.

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