Energy Consumption to Hashrate

 

Energy Consumption to Hashrate 

EATON HOTEL, NADAN ROAD, HONGKONG.

Let’s get into the details of how Energy Consumption (kWh) converts to hashrate. Considering you having a 3MW facility, and to host 1,000 Bitmain’s Antminer T17+s. How much PH/s would you expect as the facility’s hashing power?

Let us break down Watts to kWh, kWh to J/TH, and finally to Hashrate.

Watt (w)

A watt is a unit of power

Power is a measure of the rate at which energy flows; and is analogous to the measurement of kilometers-per-hour-indicating how fast electrons are travelling. One watt is equivalent to electricity flowing at a rate of one joule per second in the metric system.

KiloWatt-Hour (kWh)

kWh is a measure of energy involving power and time. Energy is defined as the work (such as hashing in mining). If you run a 3000-watt miner (let’s, say Antminer 17+) for an hour, you have used 3,000 watt-hours, i.e., 3kWh; deducing 3kWh amount of energy needed to run a T17+ for an hour.

Also, you might have noticed that ASIC’s specification comes with +/-10% - meaning the power may go up and down by 10% respectively than the specified energy of 3kWh. For this explanation, let’s assume there is no overlocking i.e., no 10% up and/or down.

 

Source: medium.com

While you hear about the cost of the machine, please bear in mind that the cost is referenced to the cost of the electricity for kWh. Let’s say, “I pay 4 cent per unit for the power.”-meaning “I am paying $0.04 per kWh to the electricity supplying company.”

Therefore, the ‘math’ would be:

($0.04 per kWh) * (24 hours/day) * (30.42 day/month)

=~$30 per month per kWh

So, to get the price of hosting a T17+ for a month, you will have to pay ~ $90 per month (i.e., $30 * 3 kWh).

To understand more, please go through my ealier post https://immtalimm.blogspot.com/2023/08/terms-terminologies-of-electricity.html

Megawatt (MW)

The term Megawatt is usually used by a farm or an operator to describe the operating capacity/power of the farm/infrastructure.

A 1-Megawatt farm, running at 100% capacity generates 1,000,000 watts of power per hour ~ 1000 kWh. Thus, the plant produces 365 * 24 * 1 Megawatt of hours of total power in a year.

Nevertheless, considering, the feasible load of 80%, a 1 MW farm can only power up to 800kWH as electrical equipment like breakers and wires, usually do not sustain continuous load. Thus, each T17+, having 3kWh can host only 267 machines.

Hashing Power

A hash is the output of a hash function, and is the rate/speed at which a computer solves the mathematical puzzle in the cryptocurrency network. Hash rate is measured in hashes per second. A higher hash rate increases the miner’s chance of finding the next block and finding the block reward.

If you have joined a PPS pool, your payout (or revenue) is dependent on your hash rate. Read more about the payment/payout method at https://immtalimm.blogspot.com/2023/07/mining-payoutsplans.html.

A terahash (TH) is equal to one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) per hashes per second. Read more about the hash conversion/understsanding at https://immtalimm.blogspot.com/2023/08/what-is-hash-power-or-hash-rate.html.

Miner Efficiency

Now, let’s talk about the efficiency of an ASIC while purchasing; and essentially, to check how many shares (revenue) can the machine produce per unit of energy (cost). This can be roughly determined as follows:

Considering power efficiency of T17+ as 44J/TH (where 1 Watt = 1 Joule per second)

So, to get kWh per TH, the mathematics shows:

[44 J / (60 sec * 60 min)] / (1000 watts/kW)

=0.000012222 kWh/TH.

So, at an electricity price of $0.04, a miner would be paying $0.0000004889 per TH.

And as a proof, if you multiply that cost by the stated TH/s of ASIC (73) and by seconds in a month (60 * 60 * 24 * 30.42) and by the kWh of the machine (3kWh), you should get the back to the monthly hosting cost.

i.e., $. 0.0000004889 a TH * (73 TH/s) * (60 * 60 * 24 * 30.42) / (3kWh) =~$30

Therefore, 1 MW farm can power 267n machines, and each machine produces 73TH/s, contributing to a total of ~ 19PH.