Former Twitter CEO and current head of Block Jack Dorsey and Tesla CEO Elon Musk have formed a new partnership to build a Bitcoin mine in Texas that is totally powered by renewable energy. It was revealed by the mine’s other partner, Blockstream co-founder and CEO Adam Back, at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami which began on April 6.
The news comes days after Musk bought 9% of Twitter’s stocks to join its board of directors. Now, Dorsey, Musk and Back have broken ground on a Bitcoin mine employing Tesla’s 3.8-megawatt solar PV array and 12-megawatt-hour Megapack.
Blockstream CEO Adam Back told CNBC: “People like to debate about the different [environmental] factors to do with bitcoin mining. We figured, let’s just prove it. Have an open dashboard so people can play along, maybe it can inform other players to participate.”
The dashboard will be open to public and will display real-time project information like electricity generation and total bitcoin mined. Solar and storage performance data points will be included in a later edition of the dashboard, according to the business.
He also stated that “this is a step to proving our thesis that bitcoin mining can fund zero-emission power infrastructure and build economic growth for the future”.
The massive amounts of energy required for bitcoin mining is one of the most immediate problems, say experts.
According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF), bitcoin presently consumes around 110 terawatt-hours every year – 0.55% of worldwide electricity production, or roughly similar to the yearly energy consumption of countries like Malaysia or Sweden.
Bitcoin’s massive carbon emissions footprint is due to its decentralised structure. It is mainly because Bitcoin requires computers to solve increasingly complicated math problems in order to validate transactions. This proof-of-work consensus approach consumes significantly more energy than centralised network transaction verification.
However, experts have long claimed that scaling Bitcoin with its present power sources is impractical. The collaboration between Dorsey and Musk on a long-term solution could be a game-changer for crypto adoption around the world.
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