How much energy is 1 transaction, really?
Solana's figures come from the Solana Climate Dashboard, dated 21 October 2026, the last data before the Alpenglow upgrade. Everyday comparisons are cited as they appear. Scroll to climb.
Keep scrollingSending one email uses about as much electricity as 38 Solana transactions.
One Solana transaction ≈ 0.008 Wh
This is the one soft figure here. Estimates for a single email vary by source.
Charging your phone from empty to full is worth about 1,500 Solana transactions.
One full phone charge (iPhone 13) ≈ 12.4 Wh
Driving a gasoline car one mile burns the energy of 160,000 Solana transactions.
One mile at 25 mpg ≈ 1.35 kWh of fuel · one gallon of gas (33.7 kWh) ≈ 4 million Solana transactions
The whole chain's yearly carbon footprint is about 500 cars on the road.
Entire network, annualized at the current rate = 2,334 t CO₂e · a typical car emits 4.6 t a year (US EPA)
Bitcoin uses roughly twenty thousand times more electricity per year (Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index).
How it's measured
The Solana Climate Dashboard is powered by Carbonara with methodology from the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute (CCRI): validator hardware is physically measured in a lab, the marginal energy cost of throughput is modeled, results scale by real validator counts, and emissions apply a geographically weighted carbon-intensity profile of where nodes actually run. Not estimates from whitepapers. Measurements.
The network-wide figures are annualized: the dashboard takes the last seven days and projects them over a year. Treat them as the current rate, not a measured calendar year.
What Alpenglow changes
On 21 October 2026 Solana activated Alpenglow (epoch 1064), which moved validator votes off-chain. Votes used to be more than half of all on-chain transactions, so transaction counts, and any per-transaction energy figure that counted them, will shift as dashboards re-baseline. That is an accounting change, not a change in how much electricity the network uses. The figures on this page are the last ones published before the switch; we'll update them when the Climate Dashboard publishes post-Alpenglow data.
Offsets, on the record
Against its 2023 footprint, the Foundation retired 45,199.35 tCO₂ of nature-based credits via Sunrise Stake and 7,449.6 tCO₂ via ecoBridge (then ecoToken). Both are projects from this community. No newer offset vintage has been published yet; when it is, it goes here.
Wondering why the widely-quoted 0.00412 Wh figure is different? We wrote it up.
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