The crypto crash will shake up attempts to rescue old power plants

A century ago, the hydroelectric dam at Hatfield, a tiny town on Lake Arbutus in west-central Wisconsin, was a marvel of modern engineering. The electricity generated there powered the street cars and factories at La Crosse, on the Mississippi, and in Winona, another lumber town across the river in Minnesota. Cheap power was “making this city practically an electrically operated manufacturing point”, reported the Winona Republican-Herald, a now-defunct newspaper, in 1922.