DONALD TRUMP IS CRACKING DOWN ON CLEAN POWER.ERIC TRUMP IS TURNING IT INTO BITCOINS.

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.

- BY RUSS CHOMA

“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, 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 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 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.