Update: if you're going to downvote me, see below before you do so. I have been there, I have seen it, I have talked to people who worked at the plant and the dam.
Citation needed .
It is rarely if ever too expensive to transmit electricity anywhere . We have offshore wind solar farms in remote places , there is even cross continent lines between Africa and Spain .
I am deeply skeptical it is too expensive for upstate NY to transmit power when there is probably 50 million people living in metro areas within say a 750 mile radius .
Every other dam is remote, every coal plant is remote they are all perfectly able to transmit to urban and industrial centers
The plant was shut down and nobody made an effort to direct the power elsewhere.
Transmission is insanely expensive at scale. I've seen their power bills and I talked to their head electrician who worked at the plant when it was operational. That's the best citation I can give you, sorry.
Have you read their website? "With 435MW of transformer capacity at its Massena complex" — that is the amount they can draw from the grid, not the generating capacity of any nearby power plant.
The plant is here: https://openinframap.org/#15.08/44.98237/-74.74862 (checked with several sources, e.g. https://www.gem.wiki/Massena_Complex).
The map shows what I'm talking about very clearly... all of the power is either used for the local Alcoa plants (there are several) or gets exported elsewhere.
There is little usage for that power locally (it is in the middle of nowhere, frozen in the winters and otherwise wasteland surrounded by superfund sites thanks to the smelting).
It also isn't like you can just plug in 115kv line into a 230kv line and call it a day. It would require new construction to send that power somewhere else, which is expensive and hard to justify over someone just paying for the power to stay right there.
I never said anything about 'generating capacity'. The dam, where I also went for a tour, is ~2k mw total, part goes to Canada and the rest to the US. The Massena facility has an allocation of that power.
I won't discuss this further.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
I didn't say it can't be transmitted elsewhere.
I said that it was expensive to do so and I've seen with my own two eyes the proof of that expense. The proof of that expense is that it hasn't been done yet, despite years of opportunities and the fact that it can be done (which I agree with you on).
For the record, my salary does not depend on this at all.
As I said, I no longer mine anything and haven't since ETH went to PoS. Which, by the way, consumes very little power now.
>It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Little sneaky to put that last comment there, useless completely and spiteful? Just because your hypothesis turned out to be wrong doesn't mean you cannot admit it
Cryptocurrency miners rank worse than oil and coal executives in my book.
(I've seen nothing to suggest my hypothesis is wrong.)
That's your opinion.
> and there are other energy intensive industries that would have brought some prosperity to the region.
If that were true, it would have already happened.