Overview
- The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance based its mid‑2026 estimate on physical measurements of about 8,522 full nodes and a network‑weighted average draw of roughly 105 watts per node to arrive at 7.87 GWh annually.
- Ethereum’s move from Proof‑of‑Work to Proof‑of‑Stake cut annual energy use by more than 99.9, reducing continuous power demand from about 2.4 GW pre‑Merge to roughly 0.90 MW today.
- Annual emissions are now estimated at about 2.37 kilotonnes CO2e and roughly 56.4% of the electricity feeding nodes comes from low‑carbon sources (39.4% renewables and 17.0% nuclear).
- The report shows infrastructure concentration matters: the US, Germany, Finland and France host about 62% of full nodes and roughly 36% run on residential hardware while 64% run in cloud or data centers with major providers like Hetzner, AWS and OVH holding about 40% of nodes.
- Practical implications include fewer ESG objections to institutional adoption and a clear path for further savings, because future reductions will depend on protocol changes such as stateless verification and on shifting node hosting to cleaner grids.