Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Digitalisation of Research: "Measuring Ethereum's Energy Consumption for EU Reporting" 2026.11.05 with Yahn Costa Hackspacher

Ethereum’s electricity use fell by about 99.95% after it changed the way new coins are acquired. Service providers still need to report operational energy use, e.g. under the EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR). Existing estimates either assume every computer on the network uses the same amount of power, or they rely on rough overall counts. Both approaches ignore details that each computer already shares publicly: what software it runs, what type of chip it uses, where it is hosted, and what job it does.

We scan the network to find its computers and estimate each one’s power use from what we can see about it, based on published measurements. For this work, we ran Ethereum on a range of devices, measured how much electricity each one used, and compared the results. On this foundation, we built a model that can supply the energy data required by MiCAR more precisely than existing approaches. We built on earlier research, merged the complementary parts of existing models, and made updates and improvements to them.