Could Tesla Turn Solar Roofs & EVs Into Bitcoin Mines?

February 23, 2021 by admin 34 Comments

While Tesla’s recent purchase of $1.5 billion in Bitcoin rubbed its critics and many environmentalists the wrong way, I have mentioned before that for Tesla to clean the house, it had to get dirty. This theory by ZDNet is one way Tesla could clean the proverbial house of bitcoin mining’s effect on the environment.

The article noted that Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk, could have another, more out of this world approach for Tesla that is as “crazy ambitious as building giant reusable space rockets that can land on their tails.”

It’s simple. Your solar roof could become the ultimate idle money game. Imagine for a moment that Tesla adds a feature to its on-premise solar energy and battery energy management computer that is built into its inverter system or Powerwalls. This capability would give Tesla the GPUs needed for mining cryptocurrencies.

These are connected to the home Wi-Fi and already have a management app. Upgrading it with Wi-Fi6 and attaching it to a cryptocurrency network along with an easy-to-use mobile app for cryptocurrency account management would be an achievable systems integration effort for Tesla, the author pointed out.

If Tesla was to do this, then it would be possible to transform your home into what the author calls the ultimate idle money-producing game. You could generate actual bitcoin with the surplus energy that your solar system makes.

This could be more lucrative than getting the net metering discount from your power company. This, the author noted, is not incentivized to be price competitive with your solar system’s energy output — many of these companies are underpaying for excess electricity generation.

One thing that was noted is that those living in a state with plenty of sunshine who has a large enough solar array could add an entire chain of these GPUs to their solar computer and make a sweet stash of crypto. This is assuming that Tesla develops an easily expandable modular design that could be used as an add-on product for its Powerwall.

The article also explained why using GPUs for this is needed. The GPU would need to be power-efficient and require minimal cooling (fanless or even water-cooled). Co-locating them with the inverter/Powerwall would enable them to operate in environments that could get as hot as the inside of a garage during the summer months.

The author noted that Tesla has already used an ambitious GUP in its latest vehicles and that it uses a custom AMD RDNA 2 GPU with 10 teraflops of computing power. This puts Tesla on par with some of the most powerful console gaming systems on the market. “With an onboard system like this, you wouldn’t even need a GPU-equipped Powerwall; when the vehicle is being charged, it could be used to generate cryptocurrency as well,” the author explained.

I really think that this is doable, and if Tesla does plan to do this or something along these lines, it would also achieve something that no other crypto miner has done — fully integrate the mining of cryptocurrencies into a business that is focused on sustainability.

Tesla could add bitcoin and crypto mining to its list of industries that it revolutionized. Critics were upset with Tesla’s purchase of bitcoin, some specifically for environmental reasons, yet what if Tesla plans to clean out the dirt by getting dirty first? We have no idea, and this is just a theory after all — but an excellent one.

Images courtesy of CleanTechnica

This article was originally published by Evobsession.com. Read the original article here.