Bitcoin Energy Consumption in 2026: Real Numbers, No Hype

Bitcoin uses about 0.5% of the world's electricity, more than half of it from sustainable sources, and modern Bitcoin miners do the same work on a tenth of the energy.

By Michal Beno, CEO, OneMiners12 October 2026

Bitcoin uses electricity because of mining. Specialised computers called Bitcoin miners compete to add the next block of transactions to the shared ledger by making trillions of guesses per second. That competition is what makes the record expensive to attack: anyone who wanted to rewrite it would have to spend at least as much energy again. Today the network performs about 970 EH/s, or 970 billion billion guesses per second, and every guess costs a tiny amount of energy.

Two units come up again and again. A terawatt-hour (TWh) is a billion kilowatt-hours, the unit on a household power bill. Joules per terahash (J/TH) measures how much energy a miner uses for each trillion guesses. Lower is better. With those two, the whole debate becomes arithmetic.

The most widely cited estimates come from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance (CCAF). Its Digital Mining Industry Report, published on 29 April 2025 and based on a survey of 49 mining firms operating in 23 countries, estimated annual consumption at about 138 TWh, around 0.5% of the world's electricity, with emissions of about 39.8 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Cambridge also runs the live Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI), which models power use from hashrate and hardware efficiency. Network hashrate has kept rising since that survey, so today's figure is likely higher, and different models land on different numbers. A fair reading: Bitcoin uses well over 100 TWh a year, around half a percent of global electricity.

Context matters more than the raw number. The International Energy Agency's Energy and AI report, published in April 2025, found that data centres worldwide used about 415 TWh in 2024, roughly 1.5% of global electricity, and projected that this would more than double to around 945 TWh by 2030, driven largely by artificial intelligence. A 2026 IEA briefing put electricity for space cooling, mostly air conditioning and fans, at more than 2,900 TWh in 2025, about 10% of the world's electricity use.

None of that makes Bitcoin's footprint small. Half a percent of world electricity is a real amount of power. But it is not the outlier it is sometimes painted as. The more useful questions are how efficiently that energy is used, where it comes from, and whether mining can do something useful for the grid.

The Antminer S9, the workhorse of the late 2010s, was rated by its maker Bitmain at about 98 J/TH. Today's Antminer S23 Hyd is rated at 9.5 J/TH, and the air-cooled Antminer S23 at 11.0 J/TH. That is roughly a tenfold gain in work done per unit of electricity. Each new chip generation packs more, smaller transistors that need less energy for each hash.

To see why that matters, run a thought experiment. Doing today's 970 EH/s entirely on S9-era hardware would need about 95 gigawatts around the clock. Doing it entirely on S23 Hyd hardware would need about 9.2 gigawatts. The real network is a mix of old and new Bitcoin miners, but economics push it steadily towards the efficient end, because older models stop covering their power bill.

Bitcoin miner efficiency by generation

Bitcoin miner	Efficiency	Power per 1 PH/s
Bitmain S9 (late 2010s)	98 J/TH	98 kW
Antminer S19k Pro 110T	23 J/TH	23 kW
Antminer S21 200T	17.6 J/TH	17.6 kW
Antminer S21 Pro 245T	15 J/TH	15 kW
Antminer S23 318T	11 J/TH	11 kW
Antminer S23 Hyd 580T	9.5 J/TH	9.5 kW

Manufacturer ratings. S9 per Bitmain spec (0.098 J/GH). Others: OneMiners catalogue, 5 October 2026. 1 PH/s = 1,000 TH/s.

According to the same Cambridge report, 52.4% of the electricity used by surveyed miners came from sustainable sources, made up of 42.6% renewables such as hydropower and wind, and 9.8% nuclear. Natural gas was the largest single source at 38.2%, and coal supplied 8.9%.

That is a big shift from Cambridge's 2022 estimate. Sustainable sources rose from 37.6%, coal fell from 36.6% to 8.9%, and natural gas rose from 25.0% to become the largest single source.

The balanced view: more than half sustainable is real progress, and the shift away from coal matters for emissions. But almost half of mining power still comes from fossil fuels, and a survey of 49 firms cannot capture every operator. Anyone claiming Bitcoin is fully green is overselling, and anyone claiming it runs on coal is quoting old data.

Oil fields often produce natural gas with no pipeline to carry it away, so operators burn it off in a flare, wasting the energy. The World Bank's Global Gas Flaring Tracker, published on 23 June 2026, found that flaring rose for a third year in a row to about 167 billion cubic metres in 2025, the highest level since 2019, producing around 429 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, including about 50 million tonnes from methane that flares fail to burn.

Bitcoin miners can be trucked to the well site and run on generators fuelled by that gas. Because mining needs no customers nearby, only a power source and an internet link, it can use energy that would otherwise go to waste, and a generator can burn the gas more completely than an open flare. This is a useful niche, not a cure: it uses a small share of flared gas and still produces emissions.

Most large power users cannot switch off on demand: a hospital or a factory needs electricity when it needs it. Bitcoin miners can stop within minutes and restart later with no lasting harm. That makes them a flexible load.

In Texas, the grid operator ERCOT has run a programme for large flexible loads since 2022. The best-known example came in August 2023: during a Texas heatwave, Riot Platforms curtailed its mining and, according to its own production report, earned about $31.7 million in power credits, including around $7.4 million from ERCOT's demand response programme.

Hydropower is the cleanest steady source a miner can plug into, and much of the OneMiners network is built around it. OneMiners hosting locations include Ethiopia (hydro), Norway (100% hydro), Paraguay (hydropower from the Itaipu dam), Canada (hydro) and Brazil (hydro), alongside sites in Nigeria, Dubai, Texas and Georgia, USA, across 15 locations in total.

For a miner, the clean choice and the economic choice usually line up: efficient hardware on cheap power. Hosting starts from $0.048 per kWh at the Nigeria site, and from $0.0364 on a 7-year prepaid contract. Hosted miners carry a 7-year warranty that covers defects, not normal wear.

Antminer S23 318T$6,899Hashrate318 TH/sEfficiency11.00 J/THPower draw3,498 WBreak-even power$0.151/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$8.63View on OneMiners

Antminer S23 Hyd 580T$12,299Hashrate580 TH/sEfficiency9.50 J/THPower draw5,510 WBreak-even power$0.175/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$16.74View on OneMiners

Antminer S21 XP Hyd 473T$6,199Hashrate473 TH/sEfficiency12.00 J/THPower draw5,676 WBreak-even power$0.138/kWhNet/day at 4.80c$12.29View on OneMiners

Efficient Bitcoin miners from the OneMiners catalogue. Live prices 6 October 2026; net per day at $0.048 per kWh, at today's numbers, before pool fees.

Frequently asked questions

Michal Beno

CEO of OneMiners, the global Bitcoin mining hosting and hardware platform with 15 published hosting locations, 7-year fixed electricity contracts and a 7-year hardware warranty. He writes about the economics of industrial Bitcoin mining.

Informational only, not financial advice. Figures are a snapshot from public market data and news reports as of 5 October 2026 and can change quickly. Crypto prices can fall as well as rise. No return is offered or implied. Do your own research.