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KENNERDELL, Pa. (AP) — In March 2017, Bill Spence got suddenly, catastrophically sick. A part of his pancreas died. His gall bladder failed. When he got to the emergency room, the doctors found kidney cancer. “Let’s see if you can make it 48 hours,” his doctor told him.
Just a few weeks earlier, Mr. Spence, a cheerful tower of a man whose signature ponytail had been updated to a gray man bun, had walked into the Scrubgrass waste coal plant that he had just bought and hung a black pirate flag in the office. The coal plant was a pirate ship, he announced. “We sink or profit together.”
The power plant and the mountains of waste coal that it burns were now in the hands of this group, not the large corporations and hedge funds that had owned it until then. Then, all of a sudden, the captain of the ship was on death’s door.
When Scrubgrass’ general manager, R.J. Shaffer, learned the news, he printed out a photo of the Venango County power plant and delivered it to Mr. Spence’s hospital bedside. The picture had two pirate flags, the signatures of the crew, and was captioned: “The ‘Power’ of Healing.”
“I knew it would be an inspiration for him to get better,” Mr. Shaffer said.
And Mr. Spence did. The recovery left him homebound for several years, but it also left him with plenty of time to do what he does: come up with business ideas.
The plant he had bought was in trouble. It was competing with cheap natural gas on the power grid and losing — endangering the 35 jobs at Scrubgrass Generating Station along with the effort to clean up millions of tons of leaching coal waste left behind by mining companies over the course of decades.
The plant couldn’t just rely on the grid for revenue anymore, because the grid simply didn’t need its power all that often. Mr. Spence started to look for other customers.
As Mr. Spence convalesced, Mr. Shaffer and the plant’s engineering manager, Jeff Campbell, would visit with him in his Fox Chapel home to brainstorm ideas.
“Do you know what a Bitcoin is?” Mr. Spence asked them one
day in late 2017.
Bitcoin is the most widespread of the cryptocurrencies in use today. These digital currencies, which involve a huge amount of computing power, aren’t issued by a central bank but are instead “mined” by computers that perform the energy-intensive work of validating transactions and adding them to a digital ledger, called the blockchain.
Just as mining coal or gold is a matter of who gets to the commodity first, so too is digital mining, where computers race against each other to be the first to validate a block of transactions and win their reward.
With each new computer vying for the prize, the algorithm adjusts to make getting it more difficult.
Rather like a coal company hiring more coal miners, crypto miners buy more and faster computers, creating a kind of arms race that’s driving a huge demand for power.
Already, some power generators — finding they can make more money supplying electricity to Bitcoin-mining operations than selling it to the grid — are shifting focus.
Energy Harbor, which owns the Beaver Valley Nuclear Plant in Beaver County, announced earlier this month that it will supply nuclear power to a Bitcoin-mining data center in Ohio.
Talen Energy, owner of the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station in Luzerne County, is doing the same. The company said last month that it will develop a data center to mine digital currency that could use up to 300 megawatts, or 12% of the nuclear plant’s capacity.
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