Measuring Ethereum's Energy Consumption for EU Reporting (Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research))

Summary

• Under the EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCAR), supplementary sustainability reporting is triggered when annual energy consumption exceeds 500,000 kWh per year.p.9
• Ethereum's total network energy consumption is estimated at approximately 8 GWh per year, requiring full supplementary indicator reporting under MiCAR.p.9
• Solo staking as an Ethereum validator requires a deposit of at least 32 ETH, equivalent to around 64,000 EUR or 73,000 USD in October 2026.p.17
• Running the Helios light client on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W consumes a measured mean power of 0.84 W compared to an idle draw of 0.83 W.p.29

Key insights

1. MiCAR mandates annual reporting on energy consumption, renewable energy share, greenhouse gas emissions, and energy intensity for crypto-asset providers.p.9
2. Existing energy models often apply fleet averages without distinguishing between ARM and x86 architectures or separating validator nodes from non-validators.p.17
3. The estimation pipeline joins consensus layer and execution layer peer records using IPv4 address matching while filtering out non-mainnet peers.p.20
4. Nodes are classified as validators if they participate in more than 2 attestation subnets, follow extra attestation topics, or belong to a sync committee.p.21
5. A Random Forest regression model is used to predict power consumption values for peers with incomplete metadata.p.24
6. Measured wall power for Prysm + Nethermind yielded a GPU-adjusted mean of 53.4 W against a model estimate of 63.3 W.p.28
7. The Helios light client enables basic blockchain state queries while drawing only 0.84 W on low-power hardware like a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W.p.29