Clean-energy supplier EDF Renewables North America announced a deal Monday for a first-of-its-kind project to use wind power to capture carbon dioxide from the air and store it underground.

The direct air capture (DAC) facility will use carbon capture technology by the Amsterdam-based company Skytree and is slated for construction in Texas where geologic features can accommodate CO2 storage underground. But that’s not the only innovative aspect of the project, which makes use of a newly emerging approach to supplying power.

Texas has abundant wind, and EDF Renewables has large turbine farms there cranking out carbon-free energy that is usually fed into the state’s electric grid. But the deal announced Monday, and another similar one the company announced earlier this year to power a data center, will instead result in sending wind-generated power directly to the facilities.

“It’s breaking the normal model of power transaction deals,” Gabe Messercola, associate director of capital improvements at EDF Renewables, told Newsweek. “This deal is a new model of power transaction where that customer is actually physically connected to our power plant.”

By colocating new facilities with the power generation, companies that need large electrical loads can leapfrog the line for a grid interconnection and go behind the power meter to buy their juice straight from the source.

Companies supplying clean power, meanwhile, get a ready and steady customer for the abundant, clean electrons that they might otherwise not be able to send onto the grid when there isn’t enough demand.

Skytree and another company, Return Carbon, plan to remove 500,000 tons of CO2 a year with their wind-powered DAC park. In a separate deal EDF Renewables finalized earlier this month, data center developer Soluna Holdings will purchase up to 166 megawatts of clean energy to power a data center close to the wind project’s power substation.

As demand for electricity surges to power new data centers and factories, many companies find themselves waiting in line to plug into electrical grid systems. That was the obstacle for Elon Musk‘s xAI as it raced to open its first supercomputer data center last year in Memphis.

The company hired a fleet of natural gas-powered mobile generators rather than wait for a grid connection. That solved Musk’s immediate power problem but raised concerns about greenhouse gas emissions and local pollution for a community already dealing with dirty air.

A Department of Energy study released in December found that electricity use by data centers in the U.S. could nearly triple over the coming three years, consuming anywhere from 6.7 to 12 percent of the country’s total electricity by 2028.

It’s not just a problem in the U.S., explained Frank Gielen, an executive board member and education director with the EU-based climate technology investor InnoEnergy. A data center with enormous energy requirements can be up and running in a matter of months, he said, but the permitting and construction of transmission lines could take years.

“So, this is a disconnect which will push us toward the direction of behind-the-meter energy solutions,” Gielen told Newsweek.

Behind-the-meter deals also take a lot of behind-the-scenes work. The deals often require multiple parties for property acquisition, financing and meeting regulatory requirements.

Regulatory uncertainty tripped up a power deal that Amazon struck last year to purchase the Talen Energy data center in Pennsylvania and take advantage of its colocation with a nuclear power plant.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected the agreement over concerns that routing power to the data center could increase power bills and undermine the reliability of the regional power grid.

Messercola said deals like the ones EDF recently announced would likely not be possible in some parts of the country where behind-the-meter arrangements throw a curveball at traditional grid regulatory systems.

“It’s still convoluted and confusing and new,” Messercola said. Texas, however, with its more market-oriented approach to managing its electric grid, is different. “Luckily, they’ve laid out some solid rules to accommodate this kind of thing.”

The EDF Renewables deal with data center company Soluna includes a provision intended to avoid creating problems for other power customers. Soluna agreed to curtail operations under certain market conditions when the grid needs more of EDF’s wind energy.

Messercola said his company is also working on ways to better match the boom of clean energy with customer demand.

“We’ve built out wind and solar faster than the transmission grid can keep up with us, and that hurts us,” he said. “By putting this load behind the meter, we can sell power that would otherwise be extremely undervalued.”

In Europe, Gielen said behind-the-meter power deals are driving a new wave of clean-energy innovation—including some actual waves.

“We’re looking at ocean-based energy,” Gielen said, describing deals between data center providers and companies that can harness the power of tides, waves and ocean currents to generate electricity.

Other companies InnoEnergy works with are developing new forms of energy storage and innovations to both power data centers and make them more energy efficient.

Gielen said the growing power demand from the tech sector presents both a challenge and an opportunity for companies working to shift power systems away from fossil fuels.

While the pace of growth strains existing systems and adds to emissions, that demand also drives new approaches to delivering cleaner energy.

“I’m pretty sure that a lot of innovations will be accelerated,” Gielen said. “With the push coming from the AI sector, it’s like a golden gift for the energy transition.”