Coal CEOs are the new crypto bros | Alliance Resource Partners isn’t just mining coal anymore. It’s also mining Bitcoin.

It's probably to use up any extra energy added to the grid from clean sources while turning a profit (or only a small loss at worst) on it, therefor keeping a demand for coal. If suddenly we have more power than we need we start closing coal plants. These people always say "let's build green energy and coal until we get enough green energy that we can stop" and then just increase energy demands so we can never reach that point.

It's so when we finally ban coal in this fictitious utopia, they can still have a way to fuck up the planet for the rest of us

The issue is they are able to get energy so cheap that mining Bitcoin is profitable. Means taxes are too low