For an efficient current-gen S21-class miner (15 J/TH), the electricity to mine one whole bitcoin is about 795,745 kWh — roughly C$58,487 at Quebec's low 7.35¢/kWh hydro rate, and proportionally more at higher rates (about C$147,929 in Saskatchewan). Older S19-class hardware uses nearly twice the power per coin. This is electricity only, as of June 2026; hardware, pool fees and downtime are extra.

It is the electricity needed to win one bitcoin of block subsidy. Because the whole network shares the same difficulty, your own hashrate cancels and the cost reduces to: kWh per BTC = efficiency (J/TH) × 24/1000 × difficulty × 2³² ÷ (10¹² × 86,400 × subsidy), then multiplied by your electricity rate. Only two of your inputs matter — how efficient your miner is, and how cheap your power is.

Both scale the cost linearly, so a 2× difference in either is a 2× difference in cost per coin. In practice your power rate has the wider spread: Canadian residential rates run from about 7¢/kWh in Quebec and Manitoba to 18¢+ in Saskatchewan and the Maritimes — a 2.5× swing — while modern ASICs cluster between roughly 15 and 30 J/TH. Cheap power is the single biggest lever, which is why it concentrates where hydro is abundant.

Realistically, no. A Bitaxe Gamma is efficient (about 17 J/TH), so on paper its electricity-cost-per-coin looks competitive — but at roughly 1.2 TH/s it would take on the order of thousands of years to solo-mine a single block. A Bitaxe is a sovereignty, education and lottery device: you run it for the ~1-in-millions shot, the learning, and the heat, not to stack a full coin. Our solo-mining odds calculator shows the real probabilities.