A change in the blockchain Etherium has reduced its energy consumption by more than 99% to 0.01TWh/yr, the company says.
The so-called ‘merge’, completed recently, has cut energy costs because in changes the way blocks are determined to add to the chain. Before, so-called ‘miners’ raced to ‘solve’ each key number, using banks of computers – often powered by cheap fossil fuels – to make repeated guesses, at huge energy expenditure (known as ‘proof of work’). In the new process, Etherium randomly selects a miner to find the next block (‘proof of stake’).
The miners, who are independent agents, may not switch to low-carbon energy but the merge dramatically reduces energy consumption. Ethereum admitted in an online article that before the ‘merge’ its energy consumption was averaging 11TWh/yr, which it compared with the gold mining industry (240TWh/yr) and another blockchain, Bitcoin, at 200TWh/yr.
It said it used the proof-of-work mechanism from 2014-2022 and its energy consumption peaked “during the apex of the crypto bull market in February 2022 at just under 94 TWh/yr”. This summer energy consumption was closer to 60 TWh/yr, with a carbon emission equivalent of 33Mt/yr, it said.