Indeed bitcoin is more preferably than the hands over of the government in an establishment to be successful, bitcoin is providing more insights to maximizing opportunities in various energy and power sectors for effective utilizations, here they believed bitcoin mining could profit them than any form of centralized authority in handling the operations of the old abandoned power plant.
This is going to be pretty hard to convince otherwise when the amounts are right there. I mean electricity is obvious and how much you could sell them for which will mean that it's going to be something that is basic since you only calculate what you would earn by selling it, and what you would earn by using it to mine. That's good enough, and if you are a big enough company then you could do both, half of it goes to mining, and half of it goes to selling it and covering the expenses which would allow you to not sell any bitcoin at all, it's basically free.
You are both breaking even thanks to selling left over electricity, and you are also using half to get free bitcoin as well.
At first I had not noticed the article was from one year ago.. so we need to take that into account, as well in terms of what calculations that the power plant operators might have been making last year versus how they might reconsider the matter this year with bitcoin having dips bringing it perhaps 1/3 the price as it was at various points last year... but still in the end, many of us know that bitcoin can be a quite profitable investment so long as you don't get too greedy about matters, and you are able to figure out ways to balance your cashflows so that you do not get overleveraged in one direction or another.
When we attempt to figure out what various enterprises might do, or how they might choose to balance their use of debt, and various ways to create cashflow so that they can potentially accumulate both bitcoin and cash in order to sustain their operations, we know that sometimes they end up getting into trouble because they might overly leverage in one direction or another - and even with something like attempting to run a hydro power plant with a purpose of accumulating bitcoin, I would consider it a better operation to attempt to attempt to employ some kind of a hybrid model in order to serve the public with electricity at the same time as mining bitcoin, even though they may have concluded that the bitcoin portion of the business is more profitable, and part of my rationale would be that a power plant may have had public funds in the past, and there continues to be various kinds of ways that the public has concerns over its own energy costs and have beliefs that the public has an interest in benefiting from energy production - especially if there have been various ways that the hydro power plant might have been involved in providing electricity to the public in the past and might have received various kinds of public funding at various points in its life, too. Another thing when any kind of industry has potential with interfering with the water supply (or flow) and there might be questions about whether the public has an interest in those kinds of activities, even if they might be completely on private land.
I guess that part of what I am trying to say is that there could be some potential for public (and/or governmental) backlash if such a hydropower plant were to be 100% dedicated to mining bitcoin rather than figuring out ways to proclaim that the public interest is also being served by providing electricity, too... and what that divide would be might be discretionary within the plant rather than having such production imposed by governmental entities.. even something like 50/50 could be a starting point or even a target point, but it might not necessarily be the best way to allocate such operations, and maybe even the owners and/or experienced people (experts) in the various industries of bitcoin mining and/or energy production would know until they put the operation into practice for several years to find some zone of operation allocations that they believe work for their particular plant based on a variety of considerations, geography, infrastructure already in place, upkeep of the infrastructure, bitcoin price and difficulty level fluctuations, changes in the regulatory environment, etc etc).