Tesla’s Megapack battery energy storage system (BESS) solution as well as the company’s solar PV will power a Bitcoin mining facility in a proof of concept (POC) project in the US.
Bitcoin mining and services company Blockstream Mining began construction earlier this month on the open-source, solar-powered facility at an undisclosed location.
The project is being built in partnership with financial services and digital payments company Block, Inc, which has Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey as its CEO.
Blockstream’s CEO and co-founder Adam Back meanwhile said that the facility will be “a step to proving our thesis that Bitcoin mining can fund zero-emission power infrastructure and build economic growth for the future”.
The site will pair a 3.8MW solar PV array with 12MWh of Megapacks, enabling a 30 Petahash hash rate — a measure of the computational power used by the cryptocurrency mining’s proof-of-work. A dashboard will be made publicly available as the plant runs, showing real-time metrics of performance, such as power output and the amount of mined Bitcoin.
“By collaborating on this full-stack, 100% solar-powered Bitcoin mining project with Blockstream, using solar and storage technology from Tesla, we aim to further accelerate Bitcoin’s synergy with renewables,” Block’s global ESG lead Neil Jorgensen said.
The off-grid site aims to prove 100% renewable energy-powered Bitcoin mining is possible, hopefully providing an example to the industry.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk famously said in the past that his company would row back on its interest in Bitcoin due to the use of fossil fuels in mining, despite other attractive characteristics that crypto has. In May 2021 the company stopped accepting it as payment over those concerns.
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