Daylight, a Distributed Physical Infrastructure Network (DePIN) project focused on building distributed solar energy grids, has raised $75 million to expand its network of solar power coverage in the United States.
Daylight offers solar power to customers as a subscription-based service, eliminating the high upfront costs of purchasing and installing panels and batteries that can cost consumers more than $30,000. The project’s testnet went live in 2024.
The network generates revenue through subscription-based energy services and by feeding excess energy back into the grid. Customers will share the revenue by earning ‘Sunpoints’ for their contribution to the distributed solar power grid, with plans to introduce tokens in the future.
According to Daylight’s announcement, the funding round includes venture capital firms Framework Ventures, a16z Crypto, Lerer Hippeau, M13, Room40 Ventures, EV3, and Turtle Hill Capital.
DePIN shows how decentralized technology can enable real-world use cases by aligning customer and business incentives to build a robust, community-owned infrastructure that is on par with centralized legacy systems.
Related: SEC certifies DePIN token as ‘essentially’ outside its jurisdiction
Current energy grid cannot meet the needs of high-performance computing
Other high-performance computing facilities, such as artificial intelligence data centers and cryptocurrency miners, require large amounts of energy input, which puts a strain on the power grid.
Increased demand from the high-tech sector could also lead to higher prices for consumers. Wholesale energy prices near data centers have soared 267% since 2020, according to Bloomberg.
Greg Osri, founder of Akash Network, an open source marketplace where users can donate and buy computing power, told Cointelegraph that AI training and centralized data centers that power AI could cause a global energy crisis.
The solution to this is to decentralize the data center business by drawing computing power from distributed sources, such as consumer personal computers with graphics cards or companies running industrial computer processors.
“Once the incentives are set, it will take off just like mining,” he told Cointelegraph in September.
Big tech companies like Google, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are already exploring alternative energy sources to fuel their AI data centers and reduce their dependence on the power grid.
In June, Amazon signed a contract with Talen Energy to supply 1,920 megawatts (MW) of nuclear power for an AI data center and service facility in Pennsylvania.
Magazine: Blockchain projects that make renewable energy a reality
