Elon Musk’s Solar Megapacks powered by Blockstream for Bitcoin Mining in Texas

Block and Blockstream are setting up a green Bitcoin BTC mining station in Texas, powered by Elon Musk's sustainable solar battery megapacks produced by Tesla Inc.

Blockstream and Block, both of which are led by Jack Dorsey, invested $6 million each to fund the operation. Blockstream is responsible for the overall project and provides the mining infrastructure. The token traded on Bitfinex raised around $40 million for the project.

Adam Back, Blockstream CEO, commented on the initiative and said:

The station is currently in the building stage and is expected to finish by the end of 2022.

The first four megapacks have arrived at the mining site, according to Blockstream's Twitter account.

Megapacks are manufactured by Tesla and behave like giant batteries by storing solar power. They are not widely popular yet as they are not ready for general public use. The mining station in Texas will be the first to use Megapacks as an energy source.

In all, Tesla will provide a 3.8 megawatt solar farm to produce energy and a 12 megawatt-hour megapack system to store it. The combination is enough to run 30 petahashes per second of computing power using only solar power.

The four megapacks that have arrived are enough to hold nearly 5.2 megawatt-hours of energy and cost about $6 million.

In June 2021, the price ofBitcoin spiked when Elon Musk said the company will accept Bitcoin payments for Tesla cars.

Musk changed his mind quickly due to the environmental impact of miningBitcoin. He tweeted:

A report from the Bitcoin Mining Council said that 58.4% of the mining ofBitcoin is done via sustainable energy in the first quarter. The use of renewable energy in mining has increased by about 59% on an annual basis between the first quarter of 2022 and the first quarter of 2021.

Musk did not publicly acknowledge these results or retrieved his decision to stop accepting Bitcoin payments for Tesla cars.

In February of last year, Tesla purchased $1.5 billion worth of BTC and sold $272 million worth of BTC the following month to provide liquidity. According to Tesla's last quarterly report, it has $1.26 billion invested in digital assets.