Energy Consumption and Sustainability

Energy consumption

The following is an approximation of mainnet power consumption.

The average power consumption of an Internet Computer node is 700 W.

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