• About
    • Which Energy Mix is this?
  • Climate News Network Archive
  • Contact
The climate news that makes a difference.
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
SUBSCRIBE
DONATE
No Result
View All Result
The Energy Mix
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities
  FEATURED
BP Predicts Faster Oil and Gas Decline as Clean Energy Spending Hits $1.1T in 2022 January 31, 2023
Canada Needs Oil and Gas Emissions Cap to Hit 2030 Goal: NZAB January 31, 2023
Ecuador’s Amazon Drilling Plan Shows Need for Fossil Non-Proliferation Treaty January 31, 2023
Rainforest Carbon Credits from World’s Biggest Provider are ‘Largely Worthless’, Investigation Finds January 31, 2023
Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing January 23, 2023
Next
Prev

Bitcoin Operator Creates ‘Regulatory Hornet’s Nest’ with Unauthorized Alberta Gas Plant Operations

January 18, 2022
Reading time: 7 minutes
Primary Author: Jody MacPherson @jody_macpherson

Antana/Flickr

Antana/Flickr

6
SHARES
 

A company facing more than C$7 million in penalties for operating two gas-fired power plants in Alberta without approvals has been ordered to shut down a third facility, after the plant in Westlock County was also found to be operating without approvals.

The Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) has also reopened its investigation into the previous two operations, combining it with the new Westlock investigation. At issue is whether the company was generating power for its own use and if the original penalty amount should change with the new information provided by the company.

  • Be among the first to read The Energy Mix Weekender
  • A brand new weekly digest containing exclusive and essential climate stories from around the world.
  • The Weekender:The climate news you need.
New!
Subscribe

Energy consumption and environmental concerns with bitcoin mining have surfaced around the world with a number of countries—including China—banning it outright.

China cited environmental concerns and cracked down on bitcoin mining this past summer. In August, an American company announced plans to power up to a million bitcoin “rigs” relocated from China to Alberta.

“It’s a question of what is the highest-value end use of an electron,” said clean energy policy consultant Ed Whittingham, former executive director of the Pembina Institute, in an exclusive interview with The Energy Mix. “Is it to mine a bitcoin? Or is it to help to get to these long-term goals that really balance environmental and social benefit?”

Whittingham said he would like to understand the environmental and social benefits produced by cryptocurrencies like bitcoin “because right now, it seems pretty opaque to me.”

The University of Cambridge tracks bitcoin network power demand and updates every 24 hours. It estimated bitcoin miners around the world used 127 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2021. This is about the same amount used by the entire population of Argentina, Colombia, Norway, Sweden, and Ukraine, writes Forbes.

Kazakhstan surged in its involvement in cryptocurrency mining this past summer after miners left China, but soon encountered energy and environmental concerns, according to Reuters. Unregistered cryptocurrency miners were suspected of consuming twice as much power as registered companies.

“If the AESO (Alberta Electric System Operator) is doing a long-term outlook around what our electricity needs are and how we’re going to get to a net-zero grid, we certainly have to start factoring this in,” said Whittingham.

“There is room for a certain degree of self-supply. But then there’s the temptation to start taking electrons off the grid to run these data centres when we need more electrons on the grid, and they’ve got to be clean electrons, because we are going to electrify mobility and heat.”

As more and more people switch from internal combustion engines to driving electric vehicles, there is expected to be exponential growth in demand for electricity.

AESO, which manages and operates the province’s power grid, projects an increase in electric vehicles ranging from 200,000 to two million by 2041. , The peak demand from all of those EVs charging at the same time would amount to 3,900 megawatts (MW) of electricity, enough to power two cities the size of Calgary, CBC reports—although plans are afoot elsewhere to balance that demand or use EV batteries as storage capacity for the grid itself.

“Companies have a right to generate their own electricity supply, but it should ideally be in a co-gen way, where you’re using some for self-supply and putting some back into the grid for grid stability reasons,” said Whittingham.

But that’s not what Link Global Technologies Inc. was doing. The Vancouver-based company used natural gas to power generators from reactivated wells owned by MAGA Energy Ltd. of Calgary on three sites. The gas generators ran facilities housing computing equipment used to “mine” or generate bitcoins.

Link was running a 5-MW power plant in Sturgeon County, about 10 kilometres northwest of Edmonton, a 3.5-MW operation near Kirkwall in southern Alberta, and an 8.9-MW facility in Westlock County, north of Edmonton.

The three sites were each generating less than 10 MW of electricity, and Link claimed it was for its own use. The rules allowed them to proceed without an approval if certain additional environmental and community consultation requirements were met. AUC has since ruled the power generation was not for the company’s own use and found the sites had not met the other requirements, either.

“It could make it very hard to achieve net zero 2035 electricity grid targets with this kind of pulse in demand, and it does seem to pose a regulatory hornet’s nest if you have these tech companies getting into the game of being big power producers,” said Whittingham.  “And when you’re at the megawatt scale, you’re a significant producer. I was astounded at the size of what they’re doing.”

In the days immediately following news of the huge penalties, Link announced it had acquired Clean Carbon Equity (CCE), a British Columbia company that calculates, trades, verifies, and retires carbon credits and offsets. Formed in 2021 with two staff members listed on its website, the firm already styles itself as “one of Canada’s leading traders of Verified Emission Reduction Credits in the voluntary carbon offset market.”

Link confirmed its own intention to become carbon neutral by 2026.

Pressure has been mounting on cryptocurrency miners to decarbonize the industry. The Crypto Climate Accord was introduced last April and now has more than 150 signatories. Link was one of the companies that signed on to the climate agreement.

Whittingham said bitcoin miners should do what Amazon is doing and sign long-term power purchase agreements with Greengate Power, which is building Canada’s largest solar project near Lomond, Alberta.

For now, Link has had its request for environmental approval to restart its Kirkwall plant put on hold.

The regulator said in its decision to reopen the investigation that Link had “failed to disclose material information and in fact had provided incorrect or misleading statements.”

Link created a “special regulatory compliance and advisory committee” consisting of two independent directors of the company, and filed a 439-page response last November. On the first page of the document, the company admitted to providing incorrect or misleading information and not disclosing material information.

Link also said after the penalty was announced they were never directly engaged in bitcoin mining at any of the three plants. They said they were operating a data centre—hosting bitcoin mining equipment, generating the power to run the computers, and maintaining the facility for third-party clients.

The commission maintains that generating power to host another company’s bitcoin mining operation does not qualify as “own use” or “self-supply.”

Since the largest portion of the penalty proposed by the AUC enforcement team was based on the estimated economic gains the company received from bitcoin mining, the new information may affect the $7-million charge.

The company also revealed in the filing that its board of directors only learned of the AUC’s enforcement when it was first reported by CBC News journalist Sarah Rieger.

CEO Stephen Jenkins’ future with Link Global “will be reviewed at the conclusion of the AUC’s proceedings,” the November 12 submission said.

The utilities commission first became aware of Link’s operations almost a year ago after receiving a noise complaint from 10 neighbours living near the Sturgeon County plant. They discovered the company had not sought any approvals to operate.

During their investigation, AUC enforcement staff said the company told them it owned a third facility in Westlock County but said it was not yet operating. AUC later discovered it had been operating for about six months.

According to documents filed by the AUC, staff noticed news releases from the company stating that Link was “operating a 10-MW site at Westlock.”

After reading the releases, AUC launched a second investigation into the Westlock plant, which was then also ordered shut down. All three facilities had ceased operations by late November, 2021.

“I really hope they come down pretty hard and discourage this kind of what I’d call shifty behaviour,” said Whittingham.

Link has until January 31to file any written submissions ahead of a new hearing, which has yet to be scheduled.

“What we’re worried about at the highest level is we’ve got a bunch of coal generation coming offline early in Alberta by 2030, seven years ahead of schedule, which is a fantastic story, but already we’ve got a real ‘dash for gas’ when we should be ensuring that wind and solar takes up as much of that replacement generation as possible,” said Whittingham.

“And now with the repurposing of these gas wells and these generators, it’s taking us further in the wrong direction of how we need to be producing power in this province.” 

Continue Reading



in Canada, Clean Electricity Grid, Legal & Regulatory, Oil & Gas, Sub-National Governments

The latest climate news and analysis, direct to your inbox

Subscribe

Related Posts

Mike Mozart/Flickr
Ending Emissions

BP Predicts Faster Oil and Gas Decline as Clean Energy Spending Hits $1.1T in 2022

January 31, 2023
322
Gina Dittmer/PublicDomainPictures
Canada

Canada Needs Oil and Gas Emissions Cap to Hit 2030 Goal: NZAB

January 31, 2023
196
CONFENIAE
Ending Emissions

Ecuador’s Amazon Drilling Plan Shows Need for Fossil Non-Proliferation Treaty

January 31, 2023
61

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Trending Stories

Mike Mozart/Flickr

BP Predicts Faster Oil and Gas Decline as Clean Energy Spending Hits $1.1T in 2022

January 31, 2023
322
Gina Dittmer/PublicDomainPictures

Canada Needs Oil and Gas Emissions Cap to Hit 2030 Goal: NZAB

January 31, 2023
196
RL0919/wikimedia commons

Danske Bank Quits New Fossil Fuel Financing

January 23, 2023
2.4k
Doc Searls/Twitter

Guilbeault Could Intervene on Ontario Greenbelt Development

January 31, 2023
132
Ken Teegardin www.SeniorLiving.Org/flickr

Virtual Power Plants Hit an ‘Inflection Point’

January 31, 2023
124
/snappy goat

Rainforest Carbon Credits from World’s Biggest Provider are ‘Largely Worthless’, Investigation Finds

January 31, 2023
94

Recent Posts

CONFENIAE

Ecuador’s Amazon Drilling Plan Shows Need for Fossil Non-Proliferation Treaty

January 31, 2023
61
Victorgrigas/wikimedia commons

World Bank Climate Reforms Too ‘Timid and Slow,’ Critics Warn

January 31, 2023
42
United Nations

Salvage of $20B ‘Floating Time Bomb’ Delayed by Rising Cost of Oil Tankers

January 27, 2023
121
@tongbingxue/Twitter

Extreme Warming Ahead Even as Worst-Case Scenarios Grow ‘Obsolete’

January 23, 2023
341
Rachel Notley/Facebook

Notley Scorches Federal Just Transition Bill as Fossil CEO Calls for Oilsands Boom

January 23, 2023
313
EcoAnalytics

Albertans Want a Just Transition, Despite Premier’s Grumbling

January 23, 2023
323
Next Post
IceSpecialist/wikimedia commons

Environment Groups Appeal Court Approval of Newfoundland Offshore Drilling

The Energy Mix - The climate news you need

Copyright 2023 © Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

  • About
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy and Copyright
  • Cookie Policy

Proudly partnering with…

scf_withtagline
No Result
View All Result
  • Canada
  • UK & Europe
  • Fossil Fuels
  • Ending Emissions
  • Community Climate Finance
  • Clean Electricity Grid
  • Cities & Communities

Copyright 2022 © Smarter Shift Inc. and Energy Mix Productions Inc. All rights reserved.

Manage Cookie Consent
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes. The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
Manage options Manage services Manage vendors Read more about these purposes
View preferences
{title} {title} {title}