SolarPool is a Cardano stake pool project aiming to run on renewable energy from its own distributed power source. The Cardano proof-of-stake consensus mechanism makes this possible because electricity is not wasted as in proof-of-work hashing. Green electricity can be obtained via power grid as well, but running your own supply means even greater level of decentralization.
According to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) Bitcoin network's power consumption is already over seven gigawatts (7GW). It is more than single countries like Switzerland or Czech Republic use. Cardano network is super energy efficient compared to Bitcoin no matter the hardware used. But what if all the Cardano stake nodes were executed on energy efficient hardware ?
It is slightly funny that SolarPool is located in northern Finland and may not be able to run on solar power all year round. Does it make sense then ? Yes. The power supply system will eliminate the need for a separate UPS and ideally with big enough panel and battery capacity the node could be run at least 90% on solar energy all year round. One of the reasons for this project is also providing information for the community about the system hardware choices, power consumption and the achieved overall performance.
There will be no goofing around with the pool fees. Level of fees will be checked half-yearly and if changes are made the changes are published two weeks before the actual change takes place. For H1 2021 both the fixed pool cost and the variable fee (margin) are set to minimum.
SolarPool is now running on energy efficient hardware.
Energy consumption is surprisingly low. 1.2kWh for one week maps to around 3-4 hours of GPU mining with a single GPU.
