Energy Consumption and Sustainability

Sustainability is one of the core design goals of the IC, together with the goals of scalability, usability, storage, and security built into the IC by default. In April 22 there was a motion proposal requesting to measure the sustainability of the IC. This resulted in a report, published on the Carbon Crowd site with a summary on Medium.

Carbon Footprint

To measure the carbon footprint of the IC, we first measure the energy consumption of some nodes, extrapolate the average to all nodes, then weight the node average consumption by the emissions factor of the node's region. This methodology is put forward by Carbon Crowd, and audited by Fingreen AI. The Internet Computer has 275 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year.

Energy consumption

We approximate the energy consumption of the Internet computer by measuring nodes on various subnets, averaging them, and extrapolating to all nodes.

The average energy consumption of an Internet Computer node is 0.232KWh.

If we assume a power usage effectiveness (PUE) 1, 2, of 2.33 that leads to a total power consumption of 1631.0 W including cooling and other data center operations costs.

Given a total of 518 nodes and 11 boundary nodes in mainnet, resulting in a worst case of 862799W to operate all IC nodes for mainnet (including also system subnets). This is a worst case analysis for power consumption of nodes as we would normally expect them to throttle when not fully utilized and thereby reducing power consumption. Given the maximum rate of updates and queries that we can currently support in the IC, one update call would consume 38.95 J (Joules) and one query call 0.59 J. These figures are for a hypothetically fully utilized IC. With the current approximate rate of 3300 transactions/s, the IC uses 261.45 J per transaction.

In the future, the energy consumption will be much lower as the overhead of the system subnets will be comparatively smaller, boundary nodes will contain caching, and the replica software much more optimised.

Putting this in context

We see that even with conservative estimations, the energy consumption of the Internet Computer is substantially lower than competing blockchain projects, but also existing (highly optimized) web2 tech. See the table below to put IC performance in perspective.

Energy consumption comparison

Source	Cost (measured in Joules (J))
One Internet Computer transaction	261 J
One Google search	1'080 J
One Solana transaction	1'837 J
One Ethereum 2 transaction	126'000 J
One Cardano transaction	1'972'440 J
One Ethereum transaction	692'820'000 J
One Bitcoin transaction	6'995'592'000 J