It’s undeniable: Bitcoin’s energy guzzling is a growing environmental problem. It’s been estimated that the network uses nearly as much electricity as all of Ireland, raising alarms about its carbon footprint. In theory, though, it doesn’t have to consume nearly as much fossil-fuel-based power as it does today—and a new renewable-energy company has an ambitious plan to prove it.

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The firm, called Soluna, has acquired a 37,000-acre wind-farm site in Morocco-controlled Western Sahara that it says has the potential to host up to 900 megawatts of power-generating capacity. (A recent estimate (PDF) suggests that the Bitcoin network uses at least 2.55 gigawatts.) Development of the site began nine years ago, but progress stalled under its previous owners. Soluna, which has teamed with the German wind-power developer ALTUS AG, aims to build at least 36 megawatts of capacity by 2020 and complete the entire 900 megawatts in five years. The wind power will then supply cheap electricity to a high-density computing center for “mining” Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Soluna will use the money it makes from mining to further develop the wind farm, says CEO John Belizaire, who adds that it will also be able to make money selling power to the Moroccan grid. He believes Soluna’s “vertically integrated” mining model represents not only a cleaner way to maintain Bitcoin’s and other blockchain networks, but also a new way to fund renewable-energy development.

Mining—the algorithmic process by which the network’s participants agree that new Bitcoin transactions are valid—is what makes the network so energy-intensive. Miners compete to add sets of new transactions, called blocks, to the accounting ledger. This requires performing a complex calculation many times repeatedly in an attempt to guess a unique number that cryptographically links the new block to the previous one. The process stores the data in a way that makes it extremely difficult—and expensive—to tamper with, since changing data in one block requires changing all the previous ones as well. (see “How secure is blockchain, really?”)