KKR didn't dispute those figures in emails. Like many of its private equity brethren, KKR has deployed far more money in conventional energy assets like the Coastal GasLink Pipeline than in renewables.įrom 2010 to 2020, KKR invested $13.4 billion in conventional energy assets, compared to $4.9 billion in renewables, according to a recent estimate by Giachino. KKR is a huge energy investor on behalf of endowments, public pensions and other institutional investors. "And they are often immune from investor pressures."
"Private equity thinks it can squeeze a couple more years out of them," Slocum said. As a result, Coastal GasLink was ordered to hire an independent auditor to monitor its work to prevent site runoff that can pollute streams and harm fish.īecause private equity firms expect to hold their investments for only a few years, they often keep alive fossil-fuel operations that would otherwise be mothballed, said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. In a report last fall, the Environmental Assessment Office, a provincial agency, said the project failed to comply on 16 of 17 items inspected. In 2019, for example, powerhouse Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts, or KKR, acquired a majority stake in the troubled Coastal GasLink Pipeline project, a 400-mile fracking gas pipeline in British Columbia that has drawn citations from a regulator and protests from First Nations people whose land it crosses. About $1.2 trillion has gone into conventional energy investments, such as refineries, pipelines and fossil-fuel plants, compared to $732 billion in renewables like solar and wind power, Preqin said.Īs investor criticism prompts some public companies to dump fossil fuel assets, private equity firms are ready buyers. In the past 10 years, private equity firms have poured almost $2 trillion into energy investments, according to Preqin, a private equity database. The number of such firms has grown significantly in recent years, and they oversee $5 trillion for pension funds, insurance companies, university endowments and wealthy people.
They are secretive operations with investments that can be hard to track. Private equity firms like Atlas buy companies, often using debt, and hope to sell them later at a profit.
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The Greenidge plant houses at least 8,000 computers and is looking to install more, meaning it will have to burn even more natural gas to produce more energy. When the energy comes from fossil fuels, the process can add significantly to carbon emissions. At Greenidge, the computers operate 24/7, burning through an astounding amount of real energy, and producing real pollution, while collecting virtual currency.Īn estimate from the University of Cambridge says global bitcoin miners use more energy in a year than Chile. The math required to verify the transactions and earn bitcoins gets more complex all the time and demands more and more computer power. The computers earn small rewards of bitcoin by verifying transactions in the currency that occur on the internet around the world. "Mining" it, a way of earning it, requires massive high-performance computers. Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency - a digital form of money with no actual bills or coins.
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