A US investment fund has announced plans to build a wind power plant in the southern Moroccan city of Dakhla at a total cost of US$ 3 billion.
Brookstone Partners, a private equity firm with assets worth $ 150 million, has announced it is raising funds to develop the first phase of a 900 MW wind farm near Dakhla, Morocco. Located between the Sahara and the Atlantic Ocean, about 1400 kilometers (870 miles) south of the city of Marrakech, this remote location is one of the best high-quality wind sites in the world; as wind speeds in this region can exceed 22 miles per hour.
“We have exclusive rights in the area to a wind farm, but the problem is that there is no real place to put electricity,” said Michael Toporek, managing general partner at Brookstone. “These days, what you can do with stranded power is set up a computing center, develop this as an off-grid project”.
Brookstone has also founded Soluna earlier this year to develop the wind farm, after acquiring ownership rights from German company “Altus AG”.
Soluna has announced that it will develop the main wind site using a modular model called Pods. Each pod consists of 12 megawatts of power generation, an associated storage system, and a capacity of 6 MW cryptocurrency mining or *Blockchain computing center. The site can accommodate up to 75 pods, based on the current turbine technology. The infrastructure will be fully developed in accordance with applicable Moroccan laws and regulations.
The first phase will consist of three Pods, or the equivalent of 36MW of energy production capacity, and 18MW of computing facilities with the ability to produce 160,882 tera hash per second.
*Blockchain: A technology dedicated to storing, verifying, licensing and securing digital transactions over the Internet with the highest degree of security and encryption, often associated with cryptocurrency.
