Elon Musk remains convinced that Bitcoin is the future and wants to keep pushing it forward. According to the latest reports, Tesla has teamed up with Bitcoin infrastructure firm Blockstream and digital payments company Block (formerly Square), the latter owned by Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, to build a solar farm in Texas, USA, and install a Megapack to mine Bitcoin using renewable energy.
Last year, Elon Musk and Tesla invested US$1.5 billion in Bitcoin and shortly thereafter announced that the vehicle brand supported payment with the cryptocurrency for its cars. Soon after, however, pressure generated by the community and some of the brand’s investors claiming that Bitcoin production generates large emissions caused Tesla to pick up the cable and stop accepting the cryptocurrency as a method of payment. However, Musk never stopped believing in the potential of Bitcoin. “We are concerned about the increased use of fossil fuels in the Bitcoin mining process and transactions, especially coal,” Tesla said at the time.
The reason Tesla did not divest from Bitcoin when it rejected the cryptocurrency because of its link to emissions was because Elon Musk expects to see increased use of renewable energy for its procurement and use in the future, although the current situation is still far from ideal. As the transition to green energy continues, Tesla has decided to speed up the process to be able to trade Bitcoin again.
Blockstream and Blocks are building a Bitcoin mining facility in Texas, which should be operational by the end of this year. Now, Tesla has joined the project with the intention of installing a solar farm capable of generating 3.8 MW of power and a Megapack to store the energy with a maximum capacity of 12 MWh. It is the intention of all parties that the Blockstream and Blocks facilities will be powered solely by the energy generated by the Tesla solar farm. Tesla’s Megapack is a battery available for large-scale projects with a maximum capacity per unit of 3 MWh and infinite scalability.
Once up and running, all parties will be publishing their progress with the goal of showcasing the potential of Bitcoin mining with renewable energy to push it to the rest of the world.
