Tesla, Elon Musk’s electric vehicle company, has formed a partnership with digital payments company Block (formerly Square) and bitcoin infrastructure company Blockstream. In Texas, the trio plans to build an off-grid, solar-powered bitcoin mining operation. According to Adam from Blockstream, the project will make use of Tesla photovoltaics and Megapack battery equipment.
A project to reduce bitcoin’s carbon footprint
Block and Blockstream have agreed to jointly fund the building of a bitcoin mining facility in Texas at one of Blockstream’s mining operations. While speaking at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Blockstream co-founder and CEO Adam Back stated that “building things is a better solution than arguing about things”.
Blockstream and Block began working together on the solar bitcoin mining unit in June 2021, with Block contributing $5 million towards its construction. The project’s entire construction cost of $12 million will be split evenly by Block and Blockstream, and it is expected to be completed by the end of this year.
Tesla will power the bitcoin mining facility with a 3.8-megawatt solar photovoltaic array and a 12-megawatt-hour Megapack. The solar-powered mine will have 30 petahashes per second in computing power. With a 1 megawatt energy capacity, the Texas facility is capable of mining around 4.11 bitcoins every month.
Bitcoin mining has long been a source of controversy, with some claiming that it has a negative impact on the environment. Earlier this month, Ripple co-founder Chris Larsen and Greenpeace USA launched a lobbying effort calling for a code modification to substantially cut the cryptocurrency’s energy consumption.
Back emphasised that the goal of the solar-powered venture is to demonstrate that it is possible to run a zero-emission renewable energy bitcoin mine. “This is a step to proving our thesis that bitcoin mining can fund zero-emission power infrastructure and build economic growth for the future,” he joked.
Notably, the Blockstream and Block teams will maintain a public dashboard that will allow anybody to view the project’s power output, number of bitcoins mined, and uptime in real time.
Tesla and its clean energy commitment
Elon Musk’s love for bitcoin has been well-known for a long time. He revealed the firm’s $1.5 billion bitcoin investment in February 2021. But the eccentric CEO has also repeatedly raised concerns about bitcoin mining’s environmental impact.
Musk shook the bitcoin market less than three months later when he revealed that Tesla had suspended bitcoin payments due to environmental concerns, despite the fact that Tesla continued to HODL its BTC cache.
Musk then stated that Tesla will most likely resume accepting bitcoin payments once there is evidence that roughly half of mining is powered by renewable energy. Musk’s latest collaboration with Block and Blockstream demonstrates his commitment to clean energy mining.