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It has been stated here that an IOTA transaction currently uses around 0.0005kWh or 0.5Wh.

In their work example for a smart-meter sending data every 10s using MAM, that is 500kWh in a year. This is significant energy consumption.

Take for example a typical battery powered node which wakes periodically to send data. This may be powered by 6 AA batteries, each of which provides at most around 4Wh of energy i.e. 24Wh of energy. That's around 48 MAM messages before we run out of battery, which is clearly not sustainable in an IoT device.

Or a fitness tracker, which will have less than 1Wh of energy available—that's two transactions.

What is the lower limit of energy consumption for sending a transaction?

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  • 500 mWh per transaction is pretty high. From what I've calculated, my i7 takes 11,2 mWh per transaction, FPGAs are around 0.2-0.6 mWh. Still depends on CPU as the answer below says. Just to clear your doubts a little ;)
    – Werner der Champ
    Commented Aug 12, 2018 at 11:20

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A low min value can only be given as an averaged value, since finding the nonce (pow) is a statistical process.

Energy consumption for this pow process depends on how effective your cpu is working (electricity cost per hash) and in practical terms on how well tangle-upload is working. Remember if you are required to re-attach often this will add to your average min energy value a lot.

In future MWM might go down as well, so network-pound pow will help your reducing your costs exponentially.. up to theoretically almost 0 depending on network size and amount of tx.

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    That's really quite non-specific though. Given that we can define the MWM, we can estimate and input an average number of reattachments, and we can also estimate the electricity cost per hash, surely something more concrete can be determined that this? How are people like VW integrating IOTA without knowing this information?
    – Cybergibbons
    Commented Jul 15, 2018 at 16:49
  • @Cybergibbons probably by testing it, with the chip they plan to use. The answer already gives the way you can calculate it.
    – Helmar
    Commented Jul 15, 2018 at 19:37
  • Given that MWM already changed from 15 to 14 and will probably be changed down to maybe even 10, 11 in near future, a rough estimate is difficult. Decreasing MWM by one meaning x3 less calculation. I would rather give VW an upper limit of energy using for using tangle in the near future
    – instantlink
    Commented Jul 16, 2018 at 7:49

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