According to research from the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, PoS Blockchain Protocols have a much lower carbon footprint than crypto currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum. Read the findings for Tezos in this article.
Tezos in a nutshell
Total electricity consumption: 113,249 kWh per year
Electricity per transaction: 41.45 Wh
Total carbon emission per year: 53.79 tCO2e
Tezos’ total electricity consumption is relatively low. Per the report, the used electricity per transaction, however, is quite high compared to other investigated blockchain protocols such as Solana, Algorand and Avalanche.
Hardware requirements
Tezos specifies only the amount of CPU cores required to run their software (2 cores). The first two-core CPU was released in 2005. Since then, almost any CPU released since then would be suitable for running Tezos. Other networks have higher hardware requirements.
Tezos also requires 8 GB RAM, 100 GB Storage space and SSD.
Electricity consumption: calculation
For measuring the electricity consumption, all protocols were tested on 5 devices with a room temperature between 18 and 22 degrees Celsius with a new Ubuntu server 20.04/21 installation and monitoring tool Glances. There were issues with running Tezos on all 5 devices for 24 hours. Only the time the nodes were fully functional is considered.
Upper and lower bound
The upper and lower bound are measured by the least efficient and most efficient hardware.
Node electricity consumption
Tezos comes in between the highest and lowest consuming currencies. It consumes up to factor 5 of the low-energy blockchains, but only about 50% of Algorands consumption.
With this distribution, we calculate the weighted electricity consumption of an average node:
Best guess
Tezos best guess (watts): 34.47
Electricity consumption: findings
With all this data, from our lower bound, upper bound as well as the best guess at the number of nodes in the networks, we can estimate the electricity consumption of each network.
Tezos comes in at 113,249.81 kWh per year, which is the second-lowest of the 6 networks that were tested.
Electricity consumption per transaction
The range for the electricity consumption per transaction goes from 0.166 watthours up to
51.59 watthours. Tezos consumes 41.45 Wh/tx per network.
Carbon footprint
For a precise estimate of the carbon footprint, two pieces of data are required:
The location of the electricity consumers as well as the carbon intensity of the respective grid. Due to the absence of such data, we use the average grid intensity worldwide.
The best guess for CO2e emission for Tezos per year, lands at 53.79. From all the networks measured, Tezos’ CO2 emission is the second-lowest.
Comparison of results
What do these numbers mean? Overall, the emissions of these networks are pretty low.
An average American household consumes 10,600 kWh per year, compared to Tezos that consumes 113.249 kWh per year. So we can conclude that the Tezos network consumes about as much in a year as 10 American households. In comparison, Bitcoin consumes 89.78 TWh per year because of the deployment of energy-intensive hardware.
Per transaction, Tezos consumes 41.45 Wh per transaction whereas Visa consumes 1.49 Wh per transaction. In comparison, Bitcoin comes in at 17,222,400.0 Wh per transaction.
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