EPA chief wants to raise taxes on US cryptocurrency miners who rely on solar, wind, and renewable energy tax credits

By Xiangfu (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Currently if you're a cryptocurrency miner in the United States you can rely on the fact that if you use renewable energy resources such as solar, wind, etc, you can receive tax credits. These tax credits can help make mining in the United States at least a little bit competitive to some other countries yet the EPA chief recently stated he wants to do away with tax credits for wind, solar, etc.

A quote from the article:

Pruitt told a crowd at a Kentucky Farm Bureau event that the credits stand in the way of utility companies making the best decisions about power generation.

“I would do away with these incentives that we give to wind and solar,” he said, referring to wind’s production tax credit and solar’s investment tax credit.

Who would like to pay higher taxes to run their miming operation in the United States when they can just leave the United States? This is a stupid idea in my opinion from the EPA chief and it can and may indeed hurt many US companies not just miners. Facebbook wants to build a huge data center in Virginia and could benefit from tax credits potentially as well.

Also how is it a good thing to centralize energy generation around utility companies who should decide for the rest of us what is best? If we can generate our own energy supply how is that not better for the decentralized economy or the startup business owner in general? This sort of change combined with removing Net Neutrality could doom P2P.

References

1. http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/354594-epa-chief-id-do-away-with-wind-solar-tax-credits