Cryptocurrency mining has seen a new upswing in the last year. High-end graphics cards from NVIDIA and AMD offer spectacular performance to mine, hence they have been being bought in droves for mining . Those who have been lucky enough to find a card at a good price can recoup part of the investment by mining , but electricity is more expensive than ever. Therefore, is it worth putting solar panels to mine?
Currently, even with the prices we have in Spain for electricity , mining Ethereum with a graphics card is profitable . NVIDIA RTXs are the best performing for your consumer, including the RTX 3060 Ti, 3070, 3080, 3080 Ti and 3090 . Of course, assuming that the model we have is not LHR , since in that case they are capped and the mining performance falls by half. It is possible to partially bypass the limitation by mining multiple coins at the same time, but you only get a 70% return on unlimited cards.
RTX 3070 and 3080: 124 or 200 euros per month
Thus, assuming that we have an unlimited card, we can calculate the MH / s that each card yields and the money that we receive each month. With the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070, the performance is around 62 MH / s limited to 130 W. With an RTX 3080 , we have a better performance, but also a higher consumption of 240 W, reaching 100 MH / s .
With 100 MH / s, we are obtaining a profitability that is around 200 euros per month , or more if you are selling when Ethereum is high and you buy when it is low. With 62 MH / s , the monthly yield is around 128 euros .
That money is what is obtained without taking into account the price of electricity. Assuming that we have a card mining in a conventional desktop computer, the consumption of the rest of the components when the computer is turned on is about 50 or 60 W. Thus, the daily consumption of mining with a computer is 4.5 kWh with an RTX 3060 Ti or an RTX 3070 , or 7.2 kWh with an RTX 3080 . If we have more than one card, then marginal consumption is reduced. Consumption is also somewhat lower if the computer is using it while the card is mining, since it is only necessary to take into account the additional consumption of mining. For the calculations, however, we will take into account the total consumption of the computer 24 hours a day.
With current electricity prices, calculating it on an average of 27 cents per kWh with VAT included during the week and 20 cents on weekends , we have to have a computer on all day mining with an RTX 3070 costs about 1.2 euros a day on weekdays, or 90 cents on weekends. In total, the cost of light is around 33.6 euros per month, or 54.3 euros per month with an RTX 3080. When the price of light drops, the cost will be even lower.
With the current light, between 90 and 145 euros a month of profit
Therefore, the final profit of mining with an RTX 3070 remains at 90.4 euros per month , or 145.7 euros per month with an RTX 3080 . Per year, assuming a relatively stable price for Ethereum, it is 1,084 or 1,748.4 euros . If you get a card at the retail price, then you can make your purchase profitable in a four-month period or in half a year.
However, this can help us venture into putting up solar panels. An installation of solar panels with 10 panels to have a capacity of around 4 kWh costs about 5,000 or 6,000 euros, which can be below 4,000 depending on the aid available in the communities. If we mine with purely solar energy, or with the surplus returned by the electricity company that we have generated and have not consumed, we can significantly reduce the amortization period of an installation.
Mining it is possible to earn thousands of euros per year
According to the previous calculations, leaving electricity consumption aside, we would be generating 1,488 euros with an RTX 3070 , or 2,400 euros with an RTX 3080 . Thus, in just 3 or 2 years we could be completely amortizing a solar panel installation just by mining. If we look at what is saved in consumption and not what is generated by mining, we would be saving between 400 or 600 euros per year. depending on the card used.
However, it must be borne in mind that you would be saving consumption of the rest of devices and household appliances in the home, since you probably cover almost all your consumption with what the solar panels generate. A 3,000 W installation generates an annual daily average of 16 kWh (10 kWh in winter and 22 kWh in summer) or 480 kWh per month, which is well above the annual average per household in Spain, which is about 291 kWh per year. month.
Therefore, putting solar panels exclusively for mining can be profitable in just 3 or 4 years , but if we also take into account the consumption savings of the rest of the things we have connected at home, the amortization period can fall to just one Couple of years. And from there, everything you generate mining is totally free. And if you have several graphics cards mining at home, the profitability skyrockets.
Mining Ethereum with GPUs ends in summer 2022
However, it must be borne in mind that it is estimated that by the next summer of 2022 it will no longer be possible to mine Ethereum through the current proof-of-work system , but it will be mined through proof-of-stake . Thus, the network will be made up of validators that will have to have a minimum amount of Ethereum to be able to validate transactions and obtain new coins. The system, called Ethereum 2.0 , was integrated a few weeks ago, and requires at least 32 Ethereum to be a validator, equivalent to $ 144,000 at its current price. However, miners may simply switch to other cryptocurrencies or new ones emerge that continue to make mining with graphics cards profitable.
For things like this, it is not surprising that there is hardly a stock of graphics cards on the market, in addition to the fact that with the rise in light there are more and more households that are encouraged to put photovoltaic panels on their roofs, since their cost has not stopped falling in recent years. Even without mining cryptocurrencies, the payback periods are even below 10 years if we take into account the aid of the communities. And the useful life of the panels is 20 or 30 years, so it is a very reasonable investment to save in the long term, since also when the time comes to change them there will be much more efficient panels, and you will only have to pay the cost of the panels themselves and not all the rest of the equipment.
