Tesla, Blockstream, and Jack Dorsey’s Block have partnered to build a solar-powered Bitcoin mining facility in West Texas. The site will be powered by a 12 megawatt-hour Megapack battery system and a 3.8 megawatt solar array supplied by Tesla.
At the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Blockstream co-founder and CEO Adam Back — a British cryptographer associated with the cypherpunk movement — told CNBC that the new mining site is intended to demonstrate that Bitcoin mining can operate using 100% renewable energy.
Back said:
“People like to debate the various factors around bitcoin mining. We thought, let’s just prove it. Have an open dashboard so people can play with it, and perhaps it will encourage other participants to join.”
The team behind the mining facility will also create a public dashboard that provides real-time statistics on the project’s performance, including the number of mined bitcoins and power consumption. The dashboard is expected to display additional data points such as solar generation and storage performance.
Back added:
“This is a step toward proving our thesis that bitcoin mining can finance zero-emissions power infrastructure and build economic growth for the future.”
Use of renewable energy in crypto
To improve the economics of renewable energy in West Texas — currently a hub for renewables in the United States — it’s important to capture and monetize solar and wind generation, with wind often contributing more during overnight hours.
Much of the region’s solar and wind capacity is located in remote areas, creating a need for economic incentives and infrastructure investment to bring that energy into broader use.
Energy buyers play a key role in making renewable power production more profitable in the state, helping to spur further development and deployment.
Bitcoin miners, however, typically serve as flexible or temporary buyers that can absorb variable generation and help keep energy assets online while grid buildout and adoption continue. The West Texas site is constrained by local limits — described as 34 gigawatts of generation capacity, 12 gigawatts of transmission, and 5 gigawatts of demand — so miners can act as a bridge to full grid integration.
Back noted the off-grid portion of the project will be completed later in the year, enabling miners to operate in locations without extensive local infrastructure. If the experiment proves economically viable, the team plans to scale up by adding wind capacity alongside solar.
Back explained:
“You perform a kind of calculation to find the optimal economic mix between solar and battery. There’s 3.8 megawatts of solar and one megawatt of mining, so you can see you must overprovision because maximum solar input varies through the day and, of course, it isn’t there at night.”
That overprovisioning reduces costs and helps prevent downtime associated with solar-only systems.
Blockstream emphasized that the primary goal is to strengthen the Bitcoin network by expanding crypto-friendly energy sources and demonstrating how mining can support renewable power infrastructure and local economic growth.