Blockstream has started construction on the all-solar Bitcoin mining facility it’s building in Texas with Block, Inc. and Tesla.
The partnership was announced last year, when Block (formerly known as Square) committed $5 million to the project. According to Blockstream, the facility will be completed by the end of 2022.
The solar mining operation will use Tesla photovoltaics and Megapack battery equipment to run entirely on renewable energy. The 3.8 megawatt (MW) Tesla solar array and 12 megawatt-hour (MWh) battery will generate 30 petahashes per second of mining power.
Hash rate refers to the total combined computational power used to mine and process transactions.
At the current Bitcoin price of $43,676.41, the facility could mine roughly 4.11 BTC per month, according to Cryptocompare.
To put that into perspective, the Blockstream facility will be very small compared to the 300 MW operation that RIOT Blockchain has built at Whinstone U.S., a former Alcoa aluminum plant, in Rockdale, Texas. When the RIOT operation is complete, the 100-acre site will generate 750 MW of power.
But Blockstreams and its partners haven’t necessarily set out to build the biggest North American Bitcoin mining facility. They want to show that it can be done with all renewable energy.
“This is a step to proving our thesis that bitcoin mining can fund zero-emission power infrastructure and build economic growth for the future,” Blockstream co-founder and CEO Adam Back told CNBC at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami.
To that end, Blockstreams plans to maintain a public dashboard so that people can see its power output and Bitcoin production. A later version will also report on uptime, power storage and solar power being generated by the Tesla array.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has long said he wants to see more Bitcoin mining rely on renewable energy sources.
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