A company wants to build a massive solar project in Montana — of course it’s for crypto

A company looking to build a massive solar project in Butte, Montana claims it would provide 300MW of renewable power and cost $250 million, Gizmodo reported. That’s according to Madison River Equity LLC, whose parent company also manages cryptomining outfit Atlas Power. As Gizmodo reports, Madison would build the solar array, then sell it to Atlas, which hopes to use it to power its cryptocurrency mining operations. If the solar farm, dubbed the Basin Creek Solar Project, is actually built, it could be one of the largest in the US, but it raises questions about the impact of such projects, and about crypto’s impact on energy.

While the project would theoretically allow Atlas’ mining and other data center operations to run on renewable...

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