Monero Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for developers and users of the secure, private and untraceable cryptocurrency Monero. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Based on typical Monero mining equipment used today, approximately how many Kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity are consumed each day in by computers running the Monero cryptonight PoW mining algorithm?
Based on global average energy costs and the above daily Kilowatt-hour (kWh) usage estimate how much money is spent on network energy consumption based on the Monero network hash rate today?
Generally you can simply look at the value of the current block reward as an indication of how much electricity it takes to secure the network. At 8.7 XMR per block it costs about 78k USD in electricity to secure the network each day.
Based on this, lets roughly say it is 0.15 USD / Kwh, so 78k/0.15 = 514,800 Kwh each day.
Based on this answer, an efficient device to mine Moneroj at the moment can produce ca. 6 H/s/W. That's around 20 MH/kWh.
The current difficulty of the network is around 6.5 billion (average number of hashes to find a block), or ca. 200 billion hashes an hour (30 blocks per hour).
So that puts the required electricity consumption at approximately 200,000 (MH) / 20 (MH/kWh) = 10,000 kWh for one hour or 240,000 kWh for a day.
At $0.15 per kWh, that's an electricity cost of $36,000 a day, $13 million per annum.
The total cost of maintaining the network is higher, due to: potentially higher local electricity costs, some mining hardware being less efficient, hardware depreciation, bandwidth cost, server hosting for cloud miners, pool fees for pool miners, miners time etc.
This has already been answered, but I work through the problem slightly differently, which hopefully adds to its ability to be understood.
The current hash rate according to moneroblocks.info is a bit over 55M h/s, which comes out to 198 billion hashes per hour.
Let's assume the average efficiency of a minor on the network is 5 hashes / second / watt. (As a reference, a 750Ti GPU is fairly efficient, supposedly at 6 h/s/watt). Getting up from seconds to hours, that's 5 x 60 sec/min x 60 min/hr = 18,000 hashes / hour / watt. Since we're basing this off the 750 Ti specs, and they consume an average of 35 watts, then you're getting 18k h/W x 35W = 630,000 hashes / hour.
Well, in order to perform 198 billion hashes, you'd need 198B / 630K = over 314,000 CPUs and GPUs mining on the network. With 314,000 CPUs and GPUs (yes, that seems like a lot to me too), consuming an average of 35 watts (as noted above), that's a power consumption rate of just shy of 11,000kWh, or 264,000kWh/day.
Using the same electricity rate as others, at $0.15/kWh, that's $1,650/hr or almost $40k/day.
