Trump’s War on Wind Power Has One Very Big Exception

As Donald Trump rolled down the 18th fairway at his Turnberry golf resort in July, he was troubled by a deathly vision, slowly spinning in the Scottish distance: wind turbines. “These things are massive, and you’re looking at these ugly windmills, and it’s a shame,” Trump lamented in an interview^[2] with the New York Post—yet another salvo in the president’s escalating war^[3] on wind energy and other renewables.

“It’s a con job saying the environmentalists want it, because I can’t believe they really want it,” Trump went on. “It kills the birds, ruins the look, they’re noisy. If you see them from your house, your house is worth like 50 percent or more less. I just think it’s a very bad thing.”

At Trump’s side on the course was his son Eric^[4], who oversees his father’s golf empire as executive vice president of the Trump Organization. But a few months earlier and an ocean away, Eric had inked a remarkable series of deals in a very different industry, becoming a major player in a complex network of cryptocurrency ventures that could become a vast new source of family wealth. Key to his plans: a brand new bitcoin mine powered by a wind farm in the Texas Panhandle and a merger with a crypto company that once billed itself^[5] as “a pioneer in the realm of zero-emissions bitcoin mining.” 

The bitcoin mine—known as the Vega Data Center—is a 162,000-square-foot^[6] building that will be packed to the rafters with thousands of high-end computers, cooled with water. The computers’ task is, quite literally, to print money. They’ll churn their way through increasingly complex algorithms, which, as they’re solved, release new bitcoins into the world. Bitcoin, the world’s marquee cryptocurrency, now has a market price well above $100,000; it’s a potentially lucrative project, but an enormously energy-hungry one. 

That’s where wind power comes in—the Vega center was built over the last year next to the Canadian Breaks wind farm, a 200-megawatt facility in North Texas. Since 2019, the wind farm had supplied inexpensive green energy to Texas’ power grid. But last year, the farm’s owners agreed^[7] instead to sell the facility’s energy to a subsidiary of a company called Hut 8, which owns that new bitcoin mine. The deal was a triumph for Hut 8. Crypto mining is profitable only if the electricity it runs on is cheap, and, the company’s CEO told investors^[8], the new mine “benefits from some of the lowest locational wholesale power prices in North America.”

So this past spring, when he struck a deal with Hut 8, Eric Trump became a power player in the worlds of both renewable energy and crypto mining—interlocking industries whose fortunes are being reshaped by his father’s presidency. His timing couldn’t have been better. He was locking in a low-cost source of clean power just as the Trump administration was ramping up a campaign to block construction of new wind projects around the country.

In late May, Eric and his brother Don Jr. took the stage at the annual Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas^[9]—and they had a message the crowd loved. America was now a pro-bitcoin country, and their father was a pro-bitcoin president who was going to do what he could to make American bitcoin dominant.

“We’re bringing bitcoin to America and America is going to win the crypto revolution—that much I can tell you!” Eric enthused. “We finally have a competent president in the White House. And we have a president who loves this industry. And who is behind this industry 100 percent!”

Eric wasn’t saying this as a simple emissary of his father’s political movement, delivering good news to the crypto-­loving conference-goers. He was gloating about the cleverness of American Bitcoin, a new crypto company he’d recently launched with a handful of partners. Eric and Don Jr. were onstage with two of those partners—Matt Prusak and Mike Ho—hyping bitcoin and the possibility that it would keep growing in price.

It’s not illegal for the Trump kids to run a crypto empire, says Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. But the potential conflict of interest is obvious: The president and his administration “have had a lot to say about the crypto industry and whether it should be regulated and how it should be regulated.”

“The American people have always been troubled by the idea that families would want to profit from the presidency or connection to the president,” Bookbinder adds.

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to break into the public consciousness and remains one of the most valuable and sought-after digital coins. When it was established, its anonymous creator designed it to be a finite resource that would slowly be distributed through “mining.” By solving complex mathematical problems that validate other bitcoin transactions, new bitcoins can be unlocked and claimed—a process that at first was simple and easy, but, by design, has become increasingly difficult. Once something that could be done by a hobbyist with a home PC, bitcoin mining is now the domain of investors who tie together the computing power of hundreds of servers to slowly grind away at unlocking new wealth.

While it’s still possible to have a crack at mining your own bitcoin, realistically, the vast computing power needed to make any significant headway requires hardware and energy on an industrial scale. It’s akin to the difference between a frontiersman panning for gold and a multinational conglomerate excavating it from a milewide pit. These days, crypto mining consumes so much electricity that it rivals the energy needs of entire cities—one recent study^[10] found that combined, the 34 largest bitcoin mines in the United States used one-third more electricity than all of Los Angeles. As new mines are established, it’s the equivalent of adding whole neighborhoods worth of energy consumption.

“I don’t know if you could call it an industry; they just take electricity and create bitcoin,” says Colin Read, a professor at SUNY Plattsburgh who has studied the environmental economics of crypto. 

Crypto mining is almost entirely unregulated in the United States, and the formula for turning a profit is relatively straightforward. “If bitcoin’s prices go up and energy prices go down, you make a lot of money,” says Del Wright, a Louisiana State law professor who generally opposes new environmental rules on crypto. “It’s really a forecast on the cost of energy versus the cost of bitcoin, because you’re speculating on both.” 

Still, few in mainstream finance have expressed an interest in the mining business; the demand for energy quickly becomes overwhelming, and the price of bitcoin is too unstable for most investors. For years, it was primarily done by huge server farms in China, where energy could be had for rock-bottom prices. But after the Chinese government turned against crypto^[11], the US suddenly became a viable option—especially if you have the kind of access to cheap electricity that Eric Trump has secured in Texas.  

Without hard assets backing it, the value of bitcoin is largely driven by interest and enthusiasm from investors. And the easiest way to generate that enthusiasm just might be a president who is relentlessly excited about promoting crypto—and relentlessly opposed to tightening restrictions on it.

That describes Trump, who has promised^[12] to defend Americans’ sacred right to mine for crypto and has even established^[13] a “strategic bitcoin reserve” for the US government. It’s a sharp departure from Joe Biden’s administration, which had generally cracked down on crypto, proposing strict regulation^[14] of the industry as a whole and floating the idea^[15] of a 30 percent tax on mining operations. Since Trump’s election last year, the price of bitcoin has skyrocketed^[16].

There’s nothing simple about the Trump family’s ties to crypto^[17]. There are the $TRUMP and $MELANIA meme coins^[18] and a line of NFTs^[19] bearing the president’s likeness. There’s World Liberty Financial^[20], the Trumps’ decentralized crypto-finance exchange that has spun its own sprawling^[21] web of controversies. But the new bitcoin mining project might be the most byzantine of all.

It began with Don Jr. and Eric Trump joining a small investment bank called Dominari Holdings. Based in Trump Tower, Dominari is a publicly traded entity that began life as a pharmaceutical firm called AIkido Pharma before rebranding^[22] in 2022 as a financial services company. On January 21, the day after Donald Trump returned to office, Dominari’s stock was selling for just $1.41 a share after years of sliding since its rebirth. A few weeks after the inauguration, Don Jr. and Eric were announced as members of Dominari’s advisory board. They were each initially awarded 250,000 shares of the little bank’s stock, and eventually a total of 750,000 shares^[23] each—a stake that quickly ballooned to a value of nearly $10 million but has since slid to less than $5 million. Dominari is now trading around $6 per share^[24].

Within a week, Dominari created a new company—^[25]working alongside the Trumps, though it’s unclear what their ownership stake might be—called American Data Centers. With the stated goal of becoming a leader in the world of giant server farms that power AI and crypto, it wasn’t yet clear to the public exactly what the operation might look like.

On March 31, the publicly traded bitcoin mining company Hut 8 announced it would buy the majority of American Data Centers, which it would rebrand^[26] as American Bitcoin. With Eric Trump as its new chief strategy officer, American Bitcoin now had a purpose—it would begin accumulating bitcoin by directing high-powered computer servers to unwind the complex algorithms.

American Bitcoin wouldn’t own^[27] any bitcoin mining machines itself—it would use equipment belonging to a different subsidiary of Hut 8. That includes the computers at Hut 8’s mammoth Vega Data Center in Texas, powered by dozens of neighboring wind turbines.

Eric’s new company will essentially serve as a digital vault for all this newly created bitcoin. In theory, as the value of the bitcoin it owns rises—through the slow creation of new coins and, hopefully, an ever-rising bitcoin market price—American Bitcoin’s value will grow with it.

Dominari Holdings and Hut 8 are themselves both publicly traded. Their new company, American Bitcoin, has also now gone public—a huge potential gold mine for its investors, including Eric and Don Jr. But going public is a difficult and onerous process if you follow the normal route of an initial public offering. To be successful, an IPO often requires teaming up with a traditional Wall Street powerhouse, like Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, and months or years of scrutiny and paperwork.

Instead, the partners chose an easier path—a merger with an already public company in need of a new purpose. In May, Eric Trump, Dominari, and Hut 8 announced^[28] that American Bitcoin was merging with Gryphon Digital Mining, a publicly traded but relatively low-profile bitcoin mining company. The new entity is 98 percent owned and fully operated by American Bitcoin and uses that name—Gryphon’s shareholders got 2 percent of the stock and no role in the new business.

American Bitcoin, Hut 8, the Trump Organization, and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. Dominari declined to comment.

It’s a long and winding path, but it ends with Eric helping to lead a public company whose plan is to become more and more valuable with every noisy whir of a server’s fan, every watt of energy, every pro-crypto utterance from his father—and every turn of a wind turbine alongside the Vega mine. 

The question of where to get the electricity this expanding empire requires is a tricky one, but at least initially, Eric Trump and his partners are turning to one of his father’s greatest bêtes noires: renewable energy. Despite Donald Trump’s well-documented loathing of green power, it has a lot of upsides for bitcoin mining—once the infrastructure is built, the cost of producing wind, solar, and hydro power is extremely low.

That’s why Eric and Don Jr. have found themselves in business with companies that are very pro–green energy. The Hut 8 data center at the core of American Bitcoin’s business was built next to the Canadian Breaks wind farm; last year, Hut 8 reached an agreement giving it “exclusive access^[29]” to buy the energy the wind farm produces to power its mining equipment. And that equipment, according to SEC filings^[30], will now be used for American Bitcoin’s mining business.

Gryphon—the publicly traded company subsumed into American Bitcoin—has its own long-standing commitments to green energy, boasting^[31] that its electricity use has been “certified as 100% renewable.” Its website touts its adherence to ESG^[32], the “environmental, social, and governance” business principles that investors in Don Jr.’s orbit^[33]—along with the rest of the MAGA movement—tend to vilify^[34] as “woke” capitalism. Gryphon had previously announced^[35] plans to pair natural gas-powered data centers with carbon capture technology, and as recently as last spring, it pitched^[36] the idea that its bitcoin mining operations could be “the knight in shining armor” helping to support green energy development.

In reality, the armor might not be so shiny. Crypto mining operations gobble up limited clean power resources while driving up prices for everyone else, says Read, the SUNY economist. Long before its association with bitcoin mining, the Canadian Breaks wind farm was supplying enough clean energy to power thousands of homes in Texas. But now it will be sending all that electricity to Eric Trump’s bitcoin machines instead.

“They’re not green crusaders,” Read says. “Solar and wind are some of the cheapest power sources available if you can get the permit for them, but if all of that is going to crypto, it just means it’s not going to you and me.”

Meanwhile, the president and his allies in Congress have thrown up major new roadblocks^[37] and phased out^[38] tax incentives for renewable energy development, meaning that all those turbines could become increasingly difficult to replace on the power grid. The administration has repeatedly halted^[39] construction of new wind farms, including a nearly finished project off the coast of Rhode Island that was slated to provide enough power for hundreds of thousands of New England homes beginning next year. The result of all this, according to Bloomberg, is that deployment of new wind, solar, and battery infrastructure could fall by as much as 41 percent^[40] by 2028.

Across the country, utilities are reportedly raising rates^[41] for consumers, citing the increased demand from AI and crypto mining. Beyond his research, Read has firsthand knowledge of the drawbacks of mining—for four years, he was the mayor of Plattsburgh, New York, which had extraordinarily low electricity rates thanks to the nearby Niagara Falls hydro plant. When bitcoin miners approached the city around 2016 about building a facility similar, though smaller in scale, to the one American Bitcoin will be operating, local officials got on board. But according to Read, the new mine generated virtually no meaningful economic value for the city, while sending electric bills soaring with its huge demand for energy.

Read, who has published a book^[42] on the impacts of bitcoin, says the idea that the Trumps or anyone else in the mining industry are building anything of economic substance is an illusion.

“There’s almost been nothing like it,” Read says. “It’s an industry that uses that incredible amount of power, in a pretty small footprint, and yet employs very few people.”

He points out that in both mining and AI support, a facility that consumes as much as half a gigawatt of electricity—enough to power a large manufacturing plant—might employ fewer people than a McDonald’s.

“We usually think of industry as job creation. That’s why a lot of these communities are bending over backwards for data processing units for bitcoin or AI—because they think it will somehow translate into jobs and tax bases, but it simply doesn’t,” he says.

None of those pitfalls have dissuaded the Trumps. The president has thrown the full weight of his office behind crypto—everything from slashing SEC enforcement to undoing^[43] rules on crypto exchanges. And the first family’s tireless efforts to hype the industry have likely contributed to bitcoin’s rising price.

“The fact that some of his kids are getting in, I would say they have an expectation of how those things are going to move,” says Wright, the Louisiana State law professor. “If you’re around somebody who has access to levers of power, they can probably give you a better forecast of certain things.”

This past summer, the White House released a new crypto policy roadmap^[44] endorsing a long list of industry priorities. The report, which Wired described^[45] as “everything the industry ever wanted,” derided Biden’s “regulatory overreach” and trumpeted the end of Washington’s “enforcement-­first approach” to digital currency.

In an executive order^[46] reprinted in the report, Trump declared that he was fully committed to “protecting and promoting the ability of individual citizens and private-­sector entities alike” to participate in the crypto economy. That, the president noted, includes your right to run a bitcoin mine. But unlike his heirs, you might not be able to use wind power to do it.