I wonder how they justify the use of proof of work to maintain consensus. Wouldn't it consume a significant amount of the electricity generated by those solar panels?
Proof of stake (PoS) is certainly the future for consensus. Ethereum has a built-in proof-of-work difficulty ramp up already started (a time bomb) and has had plans to move to PoS since the beginning.
I'm guessing there's wasted electricity that solar panels generate at inconvenient times? If the power is "free" (not being used for anything else) at least they can mine Bitcoins.
the plan for ethereum is to switch to proof-of-stake, but that has definitely not been figured out yet. I could also see a more private blockchain supporting stuff like this. Maybe it's not open to anonymous participants, but is still more distributed than a single company.
I find movement to PoS perhaps the most important milestone toward large scale adoption of Ethereum or any cryptocurrency-related technology. PoW just isn't feasible for large scale deployment: way too much energy is wasted for consensus.