A report by the Solana Foundation claims that a transaction on its network uses less energy than two Google searches and 24 times less energy than charging a smartphone.
The report claims that a single transaction on the Solana network uses 0.00051 kWh (1,836 Joules) of energy. Meanwhile, a search on Google makes use of 0.0003 kWh (1,080 Joules) of energy.
Even more shocking is the fact that, according to the report, the total Solana network registers about 3,186,000 kWh per year, which makes it equal to the average electricity usage of 986 American households.
The Solana network is not as decentralized as Ethereum or Bitcoin as it has 1,196 validator nodes that process around 20 million transactions every year. The company wants to continue to lessen the energy usage of the network by relying on a program that would make it carbon-neutral and offset the environmental footprint of the ecosystem.
Since Solana uses a PoS consensus mechanism, it uses less energy than the networks that use PoW, like Ethereum or Bitcoin. Just one Bitcoin transaction, on average, uses 4,222,800,000 joules. Meanwhile, Ethereum uses around 644,004,000 joules. This makes only one ETH transaction equal to over several thousands of VISA card transactions.
When ETH2 will make the change to PoS, it will use approximately 99% less energy.
Ripple is a low-energy alternative as it uses just 28,440 Joules for a transaction with the company claiming that it makes it 57,000 times more efficient than Bitcoin.