The First US Town to Ban Bitcoin Mining Is Now Weighing a Ban on Data Centers Too
On a March evening in 2018, the city council chamber in Plattsburgh, New York filled with residents holding electricity bills that had roughly doubled in a matter of months. The culprit, they’d learned, was bitcoin miners — drawn to town by some of the cheapest hydroelectric power in the country, cheap enough that the city had once offered a discounted industrial rate of about 2 cents per kilowatt-hour to attract manufacturers. Miners took the city up on the offer far more aggressively than anyone had planned for, pulling so much power that the city’s utility allotment couldn’t absorb it without passing the overage on to everyone else’s bill. That night, the council voted unanimously for an 18-month moratorium on new commercial bitcoin mining, making Plattsburgh — a city of fewer than 20,000 people — one of the first places in the United States to formally ban the activity, even if only temporarily and only for new operations.
More than eight years later, Plattsburgh’s council chamber is dealing with a familiar problem wearing a new name. Mayor Wendell Hughes introduced Local Law P-2 on August 20, 2026, proposing a fresh temporary moratorium — this time for twelve months rather than eighteen — that would block land-use approvals for any single operation drawing 300 kilowatts of power or more. Crucially, the law’s language no longer targets bitcoin mining alone. It covers cryptocurrency mining and blockchain validation, but it also explicitly names AI computing, machine learning, cloud computing, server farms, and colocation services, reflecting how thoroughly the power-hungry data-center boom of the mid-2020s has blurred the line between crypto mining operations and AI infrastructure.
The city held a public hearing on the proposal on September 3, but the council had not adopted it as of this week; a follow-up meeting is scheduled for September 17 to continue debate. Officials have pointed to the same underlying concern that drove the 2018 vote — the risk that a handful of very large power users can strain utility planning, drive up capital spending, threaten grid reliability, and ultimately raise costs for ordinary residents and municipal finances. Hughes has told local media that some data center proposals now under discussion could demand around 50 megawatts on their own, a substantial bite out of Plattsburgh’s total power allocation of roughly 105 megawatts. A single project of that size could absorb close to half the city’s entire allotment, leaving little room for anything else.
As written, the proposed law would not affect existing, lawfully operating mining or data-center businesses already in the city — the moratorium only blocks new land-use approvals and expansions during the twelve-month window, mirroring how the original 2018 ban left already-established miners alone while cutting off new arrivals. Plattsburgh’s second attempt at drawing a line around power-hungry digital infrastructure suggests that the underlying tension it identified nearly a decade ago — cheap, finite local power against an industry that will always want more of it — never really went away. It just found a bigger name to hide behind. Readers interested in how bitcoin mining, energy consumption, and network security actually connect can find plain-language explainers in coin680’s Bitcoin Academy.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, regulatory, or financial advice. Local ordinances and moratoriums can change quickly — always verify current status with official municipal sources before relying on this information.