Solana Foundation announces carbon-neutral network

The Solana Foundation, the nonprofit behind the project’s development, plans by the end of 2021 to roll out a program that will help make the validator network carbon-neutral.

In May, the organization signed a contract with energy and climate consultant Robert Murphy. The consultant’s task is to determine the environmental impact of on-chain transactions.

“Transactions are the fundamental components of Solana: purchases of NFT, making trades or other actions you can perform with the network — these are all transactions,” the November energy-use report says.

According to the document, one transaction on the Solana network requires 0.00051 kWh or 1836 J of energy. This is comparable to the energy cost of two Google searches.

Meanwhile, the corresponding figure for Bitcoin is 6,995,592,000 J, Ethereum 692,820,000 J.

In total, the Solana network uses around 3,186,000 kWh per year, equivalent to the electricity consumption of 986 US households. The blockchain has 1,196 validators, confirming around 20 million transactions in that period.

The Solana Foundation said it intends to continue reducing the environmental impact of the Solana ecosystem.

“By the end of 2021 the foundation plans to implement a program that will help make the network carbon-neutral and offset its environmental impact,” the report says.

Earlier in October, Solana Foundation opened to validators the option to run nodes on rented server equipment.