Voices of North Tonawanda Residents Can’t Muffle the Constant Noise of Crypto Miner

Growing up as a child in the shadow of the Central Terminal and during my elementary school years near the main Thruway line and Norfolk Southern rail yards, I grew up surrounded by noise. The noise I heard daily could be loud or forgotten in the background. Noises that could be the scrape of a train’s wheels, the roar of a sports car, the noise of tires on asphalt, but they were nothing compared to the type of noise that residents of North Tonawanda.

Driving south on Erie toward Meadow Drive, you’ll likely hear a noise that you just can’t place. The sound is constant in its pitch, like the buzz of a swarm of bees or the wail of a long-passed train whistle, but it continues, unwavering throughout the day. This noise comes from Digihost cryptocurrency mining at the former Fortistar Power Plant and a coalition of residents and advocates from Earthjustice and WNY’s Clean Air Coalition held a press conference to raise awareness to this problem.

Think about the noise your laptop makes when the internal fan turns on to cool it. This is effectively the same problem for cryptocurrency mines. Multiply the heat generated by tens or hundreds of thousands of computing units that run faster and hotter than your home computer, and operations like Digihost use banks of large industrial fans to remove that heat. These fans and the noise they generate operate 24/7, regardless of weather conditions.

Ironically, the factory sound stopped just before the cameras and recorders started rolling for the press conference (and residents thought Digihost must have noticed the press conference’s start time ). In its place, heavy trucks from the City of North Tonawanda Highway Department began rolling in to take its place.

The company chose the site for two reasons. First, it reopened the former Peaker factory to fuel its operations. And as a site built for power generation, it already had high-capacity connections to the power grid to draw in even more power if needed.

New York regulators let the plant fall by the wayside since the operating permit expired in 2021, before the change in ownership. This permit has been approved for intermittent use. As a peaking plant, the previous owners only operated 5-6 weeks per year to supplement electricity during peak periods. Today, owned by Digihost, the site now operates 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And they are allowed to operate under the expired license while their renewal application is “under review” by regulators.

Additionally, the expired permit was revisited days before the 2019 passage of the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, which requires CO2 emissions in the state to be reduced to 40% below levels of 1990 for the state. This applies to both public and private use and, as environmental advocates point out, reopening an old, inefficient power plant running on fossil fuels is a step in the wrong direction.

This operation is similar to an operation in the Finger Lakes. Greenidge was another cryptocurrency mining operation that moved to a site that also had a peaking power plant operating under an expired license and ramped up power generation to make it a full-time operation. The NYS DEC denied the air quality permit for the power plant in 2022 and the decision was upheld by two appeals.

With precedent in place, the coalition is calling on the NYS DEC to expedite review of the air quality permit for the Digihost/Fortistar Power Plant. “Digihost, according to its own projections, admits that it expects to emit up to 312,000 tonnes of GHGs (greenhouse gases) each year. This is equivalent to the global warming emissions caused by more than 165,000 homes. In just one year, Digihost’s projections show 312,000 tons of emissions, more than double what they emitted between 2016 and 2023 combined. In just one year, they plan to increase their emissions more than the last seven years combined. That’s a big increase,” said Jessamine De Ocampo, associate attorney at Earthjustice.

Residents, however, have a more immediate need. They want this constant noise to stop. It’s a problem that affects their sleep and health. Law enforcement is hampered by the lack of sound monitors in the city of North Tonawanda. The city’s noise ordinance also may not be enough to reduce noise levels because it does not control the higher decibel levels generated by industrial operations. One thing is for sure, according to Sherwood Avenue residents, the small concrete noise wall placed between them and the Digihost installation (which looks more like a privacy fence) has done nothing to relieve them from the constant noise.