Bitcoin Mining Energy Consumption to Hashrate Guide

If you had a 3MW facility could you host 1,000 Bitmain Antminer T17+’s, and how much PH/second would that give you in hashing power?

Surprisingly, its not always the easiest to formulate in your head. So we put together a guide to help you through the process.

Breaking Down Watts -> kWh -> J/TH -> Hashrate

Wattage (W)

A watt is a unit of power.

Power is a measure of the rate at which energy flows. Watts are a similar measurement to kilometers-per-hour as they indicate how fast electrons are travelling. One watt is equivalent to electricity flowing at a rate of one joule per second in the metric system.

Sometimes total watts are also referenced as Consumption or Reference\\ \\***Power on Wall *on platforms that are selling ASICs.

KiloWatt-Hour (kWh)

kWh is a measure of energy (Involves Power &Time).

Energy is defined as the capacity to do work, such as hashing (mining). If you run a 3,000-watt Antminer T17+ for one hour, you’ve used 3,000 watt-hours, or 3.0 kWh. In other words, 3.0 kWh is the amount of energy you need to run a T17+ for an hour.

Usually the ASICs specs come with a +/- 10% and seem to get overclocked their reported energy consumption pretty easily. So if a T17+ says it consumes 3.0 it will likely go considerably higher. For simplicity lets assume no overclocking.

Specs from the Bitmain Antminer S17+ Released Dec 2019Almost every time you hear a miner talking about their cost they are referencing the electricity cost for a kWh. So if they say “I have 4 cent power” what they mean is they pay the electricity company (or hosting facility) 4 cents USD per kWh.

On a per month basis that would be:

($0.04 USD per kWh) x (24 hours/day) x (30.42 day/month ) = ~$30 of cost per month per kWhSo to get the price of hosting a T17+ for a month just multiply its kWh (3.0) by that total ($30) to get $90 USD/Month

MegaWatt (MW)

The term megawatt is usually used by a farm or colocation operator to describe how large their mining operations are.

A 1 MegaWatt farm, running at 100% capacity generates **1,000,000 **watts of power per hour (or 1,000 kW/h). So the plant produces 365 x 24 x 1 MegaWatt hours of total power a year.

However a 100% load factor is not feasible for an operation as the breakers and wires can’t usually take a continuous load. Around 80% capacity factor is more realistic.

So a 1MW farm can power up to 800kWh. If each S17+ is 3kWh then the farm can host 267 machines.

A hash is the output of a hash function. Hash rate is the speed at which a computer is completing an operation in the cryptocurrency’s code. Hashrate is measured in hashes per second. A higher hashrate increases a miner’s opportunity of finding the next block and receiving the block reward.

If you join a PPS pool, your payout (i.e. Revenue) is dependant on your hashrate.

A terahash (TH) is equal to one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) hashes per second.

Miner Efficiency

Now is when things get a bit thicker so put on your math hat.

The efficiency of an ASIC is one of the most important specs when considering a purchase. It is essentially how many shares (revenue) can the machine produce per unit of energy (cost). So this should give you a rough sense of profitability differences when comparing ASICs

The T17+ has a reference power efficiency on wall of** 44.0** J/TH (at @25°C). And if you remember our watt calculation from above 1 Watt = 1 Joule per second.

So to get to kWh per TH, the calculation for a T17+ is:

[44 Joules / (60 seconds x 60 minutes)] / (1000 Watts/kW) = 0.000012222 kWh / TH.So at an electricity price of $0.04 kWH (referenced above) a miner would be paying $0.0000004889 a TH.

And as a proof, if you multiply that cost by the stated TH/s of the ASIC (73) and by seconds in a month (60 x 60 x 24 x 30.42) and by the kWh of the machine (3.0) you should get back to the monthly hosting cost.

$0.0000004889 a TH x (73TH/s) x (60 x 60 x 24 x 30.42) / (3.0kWh) = $30#### Conclusion

So a 1MW farm can power 267 machines, each machine produce 73TH/s which will contribute a total of ~20PH.

Hash Rate Calculations:

• 1 kilo hash per second is one thousand (1,000) hashes per second
• 1 mega hash per second is one million (1,000,000) hashes per second.
• 1 giga hash per second is one billion (1,000,000,000) hashes per second.
• 1 tera hash per second is one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) hashes per second.
• 1 peta hash per second is one quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) hashes per second.
• 1 exa hash per second is one quintillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000) hashes per second.

Power Calculations:

• 1 kilowatt is one thousand (1,000) watts
• 1 megawatt is one million (1,000,000) watts
• 1 gigawatt is one billion (1,000,000,000) watts