Ethereum consumes about 7.87 GWh of electricity per year, 99.96% less than just before The Merge. That is the conclusion of the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF) in an updated study of the network’s environmental footprint.
On September 15, 2022, Ethereum moved from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Before the upgrade, its continuous power draw was about 2.4 GW. It is now estimated at roughly 0.90 MW.
According to the authors, under PoW electricity was the direct cost of network security. After the switch to PoS, it became an operating expense for nodes, while blockchain security is now provided by staked capital.
How energy use was calculated
CCAF used a bottom-up approach. The researchers measured actual wall-plug power draw for 20 combinations of Ethereum client software and hardware configurations.
A home setup consumed about 18 W, while a professional workstation used about 150 W. Given that 36% of nodes ran on home connections and 64% were in cloud or enterprise infrastructure, the average came to about 105 W per node.
The calculation is based on roughly 8,522 discoverable full nodes. The authors described this as a lower bound rather than a precise total: the monitoring system could not see closed deployments, nodes behind firewalls that block inbound connections, or configurations with discovery disabled.
The base case yields 7.87 GWh per year. The lower and upper bounds are 1.26 GWh and 11.49 GWh, respectively, calculated for scenarios where all nodes run only on home devices or only on professional workstations.
Most nodes are hosted by providers
As of May 2026, the United States accounted for 31% of discoverable full nodes, Germany 16%, Finland 8%, and France 6%. Together these countries hosted about 62% of the infrastructure.
Leading hosting providers Hetzner, AWS and OVH served about 40% of nodes. The authors said reliance on a handful of operators creates a risk that a significant share of infrastructure could go offline simultaneously.
How Ethereum compares with other PoS networks
By absolute energy use, Ethereum ranked second in the sample after Solana. According to Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute data cited by CCAF, Solana consumes about 13.48 GWh a year.
Normalized by market capitalization, Ethereum used about 33 kWh per $1 million of network value. Only BNB Chain posted a lower figure.
For Solana, the metric was 283 kWh per $1 million, or roughly 8.5 times higher. The authors estimated combined consumption of the PoS networks studied at about 38 GWh per year.
The per-$1 million capitalization metric depends on token market values and changes with their prices. It does not reflect network throughput and does not indicate energy use per individual transaction.
The authors discarded the “energy per transaction” metric. They estimate that about 92% of activity in the Ethereum ecosystem takes place on scaling networks rather than the mainnet. Calculating only from mainnet transactions therefore distorts the result.
Carbon footprint down 99.98%
Renewable and nuclear sources supplied 56.4% of the electricity powering Ethereum nodes. Fossil fuels accounted for 43.6%. CCAF put the network’s annual carbon footprint at roughly 2,370 tCO₂e, 99.98% lower than the last level before The Merge.
The researchers said further reductions will depend primarily on decarbonizing power systems in countries where nodes are located. Even if energy use remains unchanged, the network’s carbon footprint could fall as the share of low-carbon generation rises.
A few days after The Merge, Glassnode analysts recorded a 92.8% drop in Ethereum issuance. Nearly a month later, ForkLog examined the features and significance of the update and dispelled popular myths around the upgrade.
In July 2026, Vitalik Buterin named quantum resistance, privacy, scaling and a rework of key protocol components as the main priorities of Ethereum’s new roadmap.
