Senator Elizabeth Warren of the United States has requested information from the country’s first carbon neutral bitcoin miner on its activities.
Warren wrote a letter to Greenidge Generation Holdings Chief Executive Officer Jeff Kirt formally seeking answers on the company’s power generation and mining activities in New York state. The senator deems the information important to ascertain the company’s potential impact on the climate, the local ecosystem, and the electricity price for retail customers.
“Given the extraordinarily high energy usage and carbon emissions associated with Bitcoin mining, mining operations at Greenidge and other plants raise concerns about their impacts on the global environment, on local ecosystems, and on consumer electricity costs,” wrote Warren in the letter.
The senior Democratic senator from Massachusetts is one of the most outspoken crypto critics, but this is the first time she has pressed a crypto business for answers. Mining is a controversial side to cryptocurrencies that often attracts attention, with energy usage comparable to that of some large developed countries.
Greenidge responded quickly, promising to provide the information needed to show that “the facility meets all of New York’s nation-leading environmental standards, is bringing economic opportunity to an under-served area of the state and is a model for crypto mining with widespread local support.”
Vertically integrated Greenidge, which went public on the Nasdaq in September this year, bills itself as the first 100% carbon neutral bitcoin mining company in the United States, after erecting its first natural gas-powered facility in Dresden, New York. The private equity firm Atlas Holdings-backed bitcoin miner wants to use low to zero carbon (LZC) sources of energy for future mining activities, in addition to investing in carbon offsets.
Congressional requests are not only sent to the mining companies. Several crypto executives including FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried and former Binance.US CEO Brian Brooks have been summoned to face the House Financial Services Committee on December 8.