Editorial Note: Post originally written April 26, 2022. On June 30th, 2022, NYS DEC made the decision to deny Greenidge’s Title V Air Permit. Greenidge has 30 days to request an “administrative adjudicatory hearing” about the application denial.

We are sitting at a six month decision delay. 

New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation still has not resolved Greenidge’s request to renew their original air permits which expired nearly seven months ago. What is taking so long? The DEC claimed that extra time was needed in order to review all the public comments submitted on November 19th, 2021. So we decided to review them ourselves.

Owen Marshall, Chris Csikszentmihalyi and I analyzed 3,919 files containing public comments sent to the NYS DEC regarding Greenidge Generation’s air permit renewal. After Owen FOILed for the comments, we used automated text analysis and qualitative methods to find that at least 98% of the public comments are opposed to Greenidge. In addition, we conducted sentiment mapping in order to geolocate public opinion.

Our work can be found at this repo (https://github.com/Marina-Zafiris/DEC_Counts). 

The following is related press-

• Cornell Researchers Determine 98% of Public Comments Oppose Permit Renewals for Greenidge Generation
• After months of delay, NY still reviewing 4,000 public comments for Finger Lakes power plant owned by Bitcoin miners
• Public Comments DEC Needed Months to Review Ran 100-to-1 Against Permit For Greenidge’s Bitcoin Operation 
• Featured in Public Sentiment section of Behind the Meter