Blockstream and Block Enlist Tesla, Break Ground on Bitcoin Mine

Jack Dorsey’s digital payments company Block, formerly Square, and bitcoin infrastructure provider Blockstream have announced a development in the partnership they first announced in June 2021. After enlisting help from Tesla, they have broken ground on a solar- and battery-powered bitcoin mine. 

The West Texas-based bitcoin mine will use solar and storage technology from Tesla, Blockstream announced Friday. The facility will be powered by Tesla’s 3.8 megawatt solar PV array and 12 megawatt-hour Megapack.

West Texas, known for its high number of annual sunny days and sufficient wind speed, has become a hub for renewable energy in the US. 

The mine is expected to be completed later this year, according to Blockstream, which will provide the mining infrastructure for the facility. 

The combination of Tesla photovoltaics and Megapack battery equipment will drive the 30 petahashes per second of mining hardware at the facility with 100% solar energy, Blockstream wrote in a blog post Friday.

Additionally, Blockstream said it would provide regular reports on the economics of the project through a publicly-accessible dashboard. The dashboard will display real-time metrics of the facility’s performance, including power output and bitcoin mined. The team plans for the dashboard eventually to include solar, storage performance data points and uptime metrics, according to Blockstream. 

The project, first introduced at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami in June, is a $12 million initiative. Block said in June that it would be investing $5 million toward the mining facility as part of its broader goal to reach carbon neutrality by 2030.“

The project will serve as an ongoing, transparent case study that will allow us to all learn together the specific unit economics of clean energy bitcoin mining,” Neil Jorgensen, global ESG lead at Block, said in the June 2021 release. “We can’t wait to start sharing our results with the community.”

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