Ethereum’s annual electricity consumption has fallen to 7.87 GWh after The Merge, according to new research from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance. Before the network moved from Proof-of-Work to Proof-of-Stake, the estimate stood at about 8.88 TWh per year, a reduction of nearly 99.9%.
The report also tracks a sharp drop in continuous power demand, from roughly 2.4 GW before the transition to 0.90 MW after it. Annual greenhouse gas emissions were estimated at about 2.37 ktCO₂e, down from around 10,000 ktCO₂e under the previous mining-based model. The shift removed energy-intensive mining equipment and replaced it with validators staking ETH to secure the chain.
Current usage sits below the British Museum benchmark
CCAF compared Ethereum’s present electricity use with the British Museum, which consumes about 16.18 GWh a year. Ethereum now uses less than half that amount. In the report, the research center said Ethereum’s electricity consumption and carbon emissions have fallen by more than 99% since the migration to Proof-of-Stake, cutting its environmental footprint to a level below that of small public institutions.
The study is based on observed infrastructure rather than abstract modeling. CCAF audited about 8,522 Ethereum nodes worldwide, examining actual hardware and internet hosting arrangements. It also distinguished these nodes from Ethereum’s roughly 894,000 validators, which secure the network by staking ETH and confirming transactions.
Node geography and hosting matter for emissions
The researchers found that the average Ethereum node uses about 105 watts, while the median for residential setups is 18 watts. Larger and enterprise deployments consume more. By location, the United States hosts 31% of Ethereum full nodes, Germany 16%, Finland 8%, and France 6%. Together, those four countries account for about 62% of the network’s full nodes.
Hosting is also concentrated. Around 36% of nodes run on residential hardware, while 64% are placed in cloud or enterprise data centers. Hetzner, Amazon Web Services, and OVH together account for about 40% of all node hosting.
Grid carbon intensity now carries more weight
CCAF estimated that 56.4% of Ethereum’s electricity comes from sustainable energy sources, including 39.4% from renewables and 17.0% from nuclear power. Natural gas remains the largest single source at 27.7%.
According to the report, Ethereum’s carbon footprint is now shaped more by the carbon intensity of local power grids and hosting environments than by the consensus mechanism itself. In practice, where nodes run has become a central variable in measuring the network’s environmental impact.