How Energy Efficient is Bitcoin Mining in 2022?

How sustainable is Bitcoin mining energy use nowadays? Last year we talked about the hash rate of BTC’s blockchain and its constant effort to become a greener industry. Well, the reader will be happy to know that Bitcoin’s industry is now one of the most sustainable industries in the world. But what did it need to happen during last year for Bitcoin to get to this point?

Bitcoin Mining Council's Q2 2022 Survey

The Bitcoin Mining Council is a forum made up of a conglomerate of Bitcoin mining companies and related industries founded in May 2021 with the intention of addressing the issue of Bitcoin’s energy consumption. A new survey released by the council yesterday confirmed that Bitcoin’s network increased by 6% of its year-to-year sustainable energy mix use, making the industry the global leader in terms of sustainability. This yearly increase means that now 59.5% of the electricity used to power BTC is sustainable.

A More Efficient Network Overall

The kind of energy used in mining is not the only step the community has taken toward a more sustainable Bitcoin network. New mining devices are engineered to work more efficiently, using less processing power, pushing the old, less profitable devices out of the game. According to JP Morgan’s analysts, the average production cost of Bitcoin—a key factor in miners’ profit margins—has dropped starkly over the past month. To put it in numbers, the expense of mining a single Bitcoin was around $20,000 at the beginning of June, $15,000 by the end of last month, and is currently sitting around $13,000. At the presentation where the BMC survey results were shared, MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor stated that in the second quarter of 2022, Bitcoin’s hash rate increased by 137%, while energy usage was up by only 63%. This means that the network became 46% more efficient.