Cryptocurrency Miners Eye Shuttered Coal Plants for Cheap Power

Developers are exploring whether shuttered coal-fired power infrastructure in Pennsylvania's coal region could be repurposed to supply cheap, dedicated electricity to cryptocurrency mining operations, following a model tried with mixed results in other former coal states.

The proposals under discussion would not restart coal burning itself, but instead use existing grid interconnections and substation capacity at retired plant sites, which developers say is the expensive and slow part of standing up a large mining operation from scratch.

"The interconnection queue is the bottleneck everywhere right now," said a developer involved in early-stage talks with one county redevelopment authority. "These sites already solved that problem years ago for a different purpose."

Local officials are divided. Some see the proposals as a rare use for idle industrial land that currently generates no tax revenue, while others question the modest permanent job counts such facilities typically create relative to their electricity demands. No formal application has been filed with state regulators, and any project would still require environmental and grid-capacity reviews before construction could begin.