I'm trying to calculate how much energy is needed for one transaction on the Polygon blockchain, and how much on the Ethereum blockchain.
I found an article for Ethereum, which says for a high estimate of the power consumption, the Ethereum network needs about 19.44 TWh per year, see here:
https://www.notion.so/Carbon-FYI-Methodology-51e2d8c41d1c4963970a143b8629f5f9There are about 1.2 million transactions per day on the Ethereum network, see chart top right here:
https://etherscan.io/This means one Ethereum transaction needs about 44 kWh (19.44 TWh / (365 * 1.2e6)).
Another source says it needs 30 kWh per transaction, so looks about right:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/ethereum-transaction-energy-use-equals-to-2-5-miles-in-a-tesla-model-3-reportNow the Polygon network is a layer 2 solution on top of Ethereum, which needs needs a checkpoint transaction in the Ethereum network every 30 minutes, according to this documentation:
https://docs.polygon.technology/docs/develop/ethereum-polygon/pos/deposit-withdraw-event-pos/So 48 transactions per day on Ethereum for 3 million Polygon transactions means it needs 0.7 Wh per transaction for the Ethereum part of the protocol.
(48 * 44 kWh / 3 million = 2.1 MWh for 3 million = 0.7 Wh)
There are 90 validators for Polygon, each needs 2 PCs with 500 W each, so 1 kW, according to this article:
https://blog.polygon.technology/polygon-the-eco-friendly-blockchain-scaling-ethereum-bbdd52201ad/Running for a day, this needs 2.16 MWh. So the Polygon part of one transaction is 0.072 Wh per transaction.
(2.16 MWh / 3 million = 0.072 Wh)
In sum, and if we round up to be conservative and take into account all the routers of the internet etc. as well, we could say that one transaction on Polygon, including the Ethereum part, needs about 1 Wh max.
A good gaming PC with monitor needs about 500 W. This means one transaction is about equal to play a game for 7 seconds (1 Wh / 500 W = 0.002 h = 7.2 s). Using an Ethereum transaction, it would be equal to playing a game for more than 3 days (44 kWh / 500 W = 88 h = 3.6 days).
Is this right, or did I made some error somewhere?