TL; DR: Ethereum will soon witness a decrease in energy consumption of at least 99.95%.
Ethereum is nearing the end of the transition. With the successful running of the Beacon Chain for a few months, we now have access to some data. This enables us to calculate the energy usage of Ethereum’s Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus. In the coming weeks, several long-awaited improvements will arrive.
Although there are no official statistics on power consumption and hardware usage, we can still make a rough estimate. At the time of writing, there are 140,592 validators and 16,405 unique addresses. Exchanges and other staking services are heavily represented in this market. After removing them, we are left with 87,897 validators who are running their own home setups.
Energy Requirements
We can use the average of 5.4 validators per home-staker as a sanity test. Joe Clapis (Rocket Pool Developer) ran 10 validator clients, a Nimbus Beacon, a Geth full node, and a 10Ah USB power bank for 10 hours. This setup used 5W, so we will assume that a home-staker requires 100W in total. Multiplying this number by 87,897 gives us a total power consumption of 1.64 megawatts for home-stakers.
It is more difficult to calculate the power requirements for custodial stake teams. We will assume that they require 100W times the 5.5 validators per person. This is a overestimation, as the actual answer is closer to 50 times. Adding these figures together gives us a total of 2.62 megawatts for the entire Ethereum Proof-of-Stake network.
Comparisons
Digiconomist estimates that Ethereum Miners currently consume 44.49TWh per year, which is the equivalent of 5.13 gigawatts. According to conservative estimates, PoS has a 2,000-fold higher energy efficiency. This means that PoS will use significantly less power than before. On average, Etheruem PoW consumes the energy equivalent of a household for 2.8 days per transaction, while Bitcoin used 38 days worth of energy.
Looking Ahead
Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus is still being used, but this won’t last much longer. Recently, we have seen the first test networks of Ethereum moving from PoW to PoS, aptly named Fusion. Multiple teams of engineers are working to ensure that Fusion arrives as soon and safely as possible.
Rollups and Sharding are two solutions that can be used to reduce energy consumption per transaction. Ethereum’s days of high power usage are coming to an end. We can only hope that the same is true for the rest of the world.
Thanks to Joseph Schweitzer, Danny Ryan, Sacha Yves Saint-Leger, Dankrad Feist, and @phil_eth for their input.
