Tesla’s future business enterprise: Turning your solar roof and EV into Bitcoin mines

In my former submit about blockchain and cryptocurrency, I mentioned why I believed Tesla was generating this kind of a considerable investment in Bitcoin and enabling the cryptocurrency to be utilized for automobile purchases in the future. The balance of its profits stream, which arrives from offering surplus Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), will dry up in the following a number of decades as competing automakers can deliver their possess Zero-Emission Autos (ZEVs) and build up their personal RECs with states that call for them.

Permitting its consumers to invest in autos completely or partially with Bitcoin is likely one way of differentiating Tesla from other automobile companies. But this in and of itself is not a sustainable business strategy. 

Perhaps Elon Musk has one more, even wilder business enterprise plan for Tesla around the extensive-expression — a approach just as ridiculous formidable as setting up large reusable area rockets that can land on their tails.

Your photo voltaic roof: The greatest idle dollars activity

Apart from autos, Tesla’s other substantial enterprise involves photo voltaic panels, photo voltaic roofs, and batteries. The batteries are made use of in their vehicles and provide electric power storage for their residential photo voltaic systems, bought as the Tesla Powerwall.

In most states wherever residential photo voltaic is put in, surplus strength from the arrays can be fed again into the grid where the neighborhood electricity business will “net meter” or prorate a customer’s electric powered monthly bill based mostly on what they generate into or attract from the technique. Primarily based on a customer’s use and how substantially a solar process produces, there will be a surplus or a deficit.

Powerwalls can keep that surplus energy and electrical power many points in your house, including air conditioners, and cost your Tesla EV.

But suppose Tesla added a ability to its on-premises photo voltaic energy/battery electrical power administration laptop or computer constructed into its inverter technique or the Powerwall that would give it GPUs for mining cryptocurrencies? These are by now connected to property Wi-Fi. They have a management app, so upgrading it with Wi-Fi 6 and attaching it to a cryptocurrency community and an uncomplicated-to-use cell app for cryptocurrency account management would be an achievable techniques integration work for Tesla, given the company’s sizeable engineering methods. 

Also: Going solar in the Sunshine State: Why the investment would make feeling now 

It would then be probable for your house to become the ultimate idle money-manufacturing sport — you would generate actual Bitcoins with the surplus energy your solar method helps make. That may be more profitable than getting the internet metering lower price from your electric power enterprise, which is not incentivized to be value competitive with your photo voltaic system’s power output, as most of these providers are having to pay Time-Of-Use (TOU) pricing for your electrical power generation.

If you have a big ample solar array and you reside in a point out with a great deal of sunshine — and assuming Tesla arrives up with an easily expandable, modular layout (possibly even as an add-on merchandise for Powerwall) — you could add a full chain of these GPUs to your solar laptop or computer and make a decent sum of crypto.

That makes the prospect of putting in photo voltaic in your house a ton extra appealing if you figure the Tesla roof, on typical, will price $50,000 to $75,000, not counting government tax incentives.

All Tesla demands is a straightforward application interface to stage and click which cryptos you want to mine, API integration with a currency exchange for dollars conversion, and, presto, everybody with a photo voltaic roof is in the crypto business enterprise. 

Why Tesla and GPUs

To execute this program, Tesla would will need a ability-economical GPU that demands negligible cooling (probably fanless, or even h2o-cooled). If these GPUs are colocated with the Inverter/Powerwall, they would have to run in environments that could get as incredibly hot as within a garage in the course of summer months or within a housing mounted on the exterior of your house, except if they are physically networked and placed inside the property and tied into the Inverter or Powerwall’s energy distribution technique.

Where by would Tesla get such a thing? And why would the firm suddenly make your mind up to do this? The notion to use GPUs to mine cryptocurrency when its merchandise are idle in the course of a cost period or generating surplus electrical power pretty much absolutely arose in the course of the progress of its cars’ autonomous driving feature and benchmarking the onboard computing hardware’s capabilities.

In 2019, the firm held an Autonomy Investor Day and claimed that it had switched from NVIDIA GPUs in its motor vehicles to chips of its have structure in the product S, X, and Product 3 automobiles. At the time, the firm’s director of silicon engineering, Peter Bannon, stated:

So this is the style that we concluded. You can see that it truly is dominated by the 32 megabytes of SRAM. There is certainly massive banking institutions on the still left and ideal and the middle bottom, and then all the computing is performed in the higher middle. Just about every one clock, we read 256 bytes of activation data out of the SRAM array, 128 bytes of bodyweight information out of the SRAM array, and we combine it in a 96 by 96 little add array, which performs 9,000 multiply/adds for each clock. At 2 gigahertz, that’s a whole of 3.6 — 36.8 TeraOPS.

We experienced a goal to keep underneath 100 watts. This is calculated data from automobiles driving close to managing a comprehensive autopilot stack. We’re dissipating 72 watts, which is a minimal bit extra ability than the preceding design, but with the remarkable improvement in overall performance, it is really nonetheless a very very good solution. Of that 72 watts, about 15 watts is currently being eaten jogging the neural networks.

In terms of charges, the silicon expense of this answer is about 80% of what we have been paying right before. So we are conserving cash by switching to this resolution. And in phrases of efficiency, we took the slim camera neural community, which I’ve been talking about that has 35 billion functions in it, we ran it on the aged hardware in a loop as brief as attainable and we delivered 110 frames for every second. And we took the same facts, the very same network, compiled it for hardware for the new FSD laptop, and making use of all 4 accelerators, we can get 2,300 frames per next processed, so a component of 21.

In 2021, the GPU utilised in Tesla’s newest motor vehicles is even much more bold. The newest Model S (and, supposedly, the X) EVs makes use of a tailor made AMD RDNA 2 GPU with 10 teraflops of computing power, which puts it on par with some of the most powerful console gaming devices on the marketplace like the Sony PS5. With an onboard technique like this, you wouldn’t even require a GPU-equipped Powerwall when the automobile is becoming charged, it could be applied to generate cryptocurrency as properly.

The business possibility

So, Tesla absolutely has plenty of encounter with GPUs, but can it use them as a essential differentiator from other automakers and photo voltaic know-how corporations like Enphase Electrical power, Samsung, LG, and Panasonic, the present market leaders in the photo voltaic room?

While sleeker and additional tightly built-in, Tesla’s photo voltaic roof is much more high-priced than competing answers, and that is been hampering adoption. Its photo voltaic roof answer is currently only much more competitive in situations the place an overall roof has to be changed.

Having a roof that generates income for the buyer when making use of surplus strength could be a important marketing issue, mostly if a considerable portion of the cryptocurrency money could be utilized to the financed cost of the solar panels or the payments on a Tesla automobile. If it delivers down the equal price of a Design S from $75,000 to $65,000 throughout a five-yr finance time period, or a $50,000 Product 3 to $40,000, that’s a very good incentive. It also would make a payoff of a $70,000 roof that substantially a lot quicker of a return on financial commitment, even if the GPU piece adds a number of thousand dollars to the buy price.

Tesla could also professional-price the price of the roofs (and the autos) by properly leasing the GPUs’ room in every home (or at professional enterprise in which the roofs or photo voltaic cells are put in) and maintain the stability of the crypto cash flow for on their own.

Also: Scallops, vaccines and Tesla: The wild environment of blockchain and cryptocurrency

And if you bought that automobile or that roof or panels in funds? That vehicle’s GPU or the solar roof GPU stack (assuming you can increase numerous just as you can with various Powerwalls) ought to be creating assets for you that increase in worth. Tesla shouldn’t get to maintain any of it.

Even so, as an alternative of making use of the cryptocurrency generated by the methods to pay back off fiat forex-primarily based financing, it is additional probable that it could be made use of to build up “credits” in an escrowed account Tesla would honor toward foreseeable future buys. Tesla itself would maintain the cryptocurrency revenue, like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, or regardless of what instrument the GPUs crank out — but the customer would have loyalty points gathered. If a new car or truck charges 100,000 loyalty points, and more than five decades, your roof and your motor vehicle deliver 30,000, that could be applied toward your up coming car or truck order — locking you into that ecosystem.

Is Tesla heading to differentiate from other photo voltaic and car brands by using automotive and solar electricity compute GPUs to deliver cryptocurrency? Talk Back again and Let Me Know.