> Energy consumption is measured in terawatt hours, not TW, and page you linked to says annualised consumption is 90TWh , which is on par with the netherlands annual consumption. This is hardly partisanship, its an enormous amout of power.
You can measure energy consumption over a given time period in terawatt hours; for example, consuming a terawatt for one hour is consuming one terawatt hour, while consuming a terawatt for two hours, or consuming two terawatts for one hour, is consuming two terawatt hours. The standard term for "energy consumption over a given time period" is "power", and the standard SI unit for power is the watt. A terawatt hour per year is precisely and identically some number of watts; I calculate it as 114,079,550 watts, or more conveniently 114.1 megawatts, because an hour is about 0.00014407955 years.
If you want to measure power consumption in ad-hoc units of 114.1 megawatts or poundal-fathoms per Planck time, I can't stop you, and you can even do correct calculations with them, but, myself, I prefer to use SI units, because they greatly facilitate mental arithmetic and comparisons.
(This has been a brief introduction to the basics of the Systeme Internationale of units.)
If you scroll up about 512 pixels from where you were looking on that page, which currently says annualized consumption is probably about 93.01 TWh/year, you'll see that they also provide the same number in a different form, as 11.76 GW. (This is a slight arithmetic error; 11.76 GW actually adds up to 93.01 TWh every 330 days. Perhaps the 11.76 GW is a 7-day moving average and the 93.01 TWh/year is instantaneous power consumption, or vice versa.)
Whether 11.76 GW is "an enormous amount of power" or not depends on what you're comparing it to. Total world marketed energy consumption is about 18-20 TW, so compared to world marketed energy consumption, it's not an enormous amount of power. (A terawatt is 1000 gigawatts.) Terrestrial insolation is about 130 petawatts (a petawatt is 1000 TW); about 0.3% of that falls on arable land, so agriculture uses about 350 TW of power, almost 20 times world marketed energy consumption.
Unsurprisingly, you're also mistaken about the Netherlands' power consumption, perhaps because you don't know about non-electrical forms of energy such as kinetic energy, chemical energy, and (very ironically in this context) solar energy; even their electrical energy consumption alone is 119 TWh/year, which is 13.6 GW, but most of their energy consumption is not electrical; their total energy consumption is more than 100 GW.
So, Bitcoin provides a secure digital currency to 7.8 billion people for, probably, significantly less energy than the Netherlands uses to provide electricity to 0.018 billion people. (A million is 0.001 billion.)
Is it partisanship to call that "an enormous amount of power"? Maybe, maybe not, it's a valid subjective perspective. But it's clearly partisanship to not care whether it's 12 GW or 1000 GW.
You can measure energy consumption over a given time period in terawatt hours; for example, consuming a terawatt for one hour is consuming one terawatt hour, while consuming a terawatt for two hours, or consuming two terawatts for one hour, is consuming two terawatt hours. The standard term for "energy consumption over a given time period" is "power", and the standard SI unit for power is the watt. A terawatt hour per year is precisely and identically some number of watts; I calculate it as 114,079,550 watts, or more conveniently 114.1 megawatts, because an hour is about 0.00014407955 years.
If you want to measure power consumption in ad-hoc units of 114.1 megawatts or poundal-fathoms per Planck time, I can't stop you, and you can even do correct calculations with them, but, myself, I prefer to use SI units, because they greatly facilitate mental arithmetic and comparisons.
(This has been a brief introduction to the basics of the Systeme Internationale of units.)
If you scroll up about 512 pixels from where you were looking on that page, which currently says annualized consumption is probably about 93.01 TWh/year, you'll see that they also provide the same number in a different form, as 11.76 GW. (This is a slight arithmetic error; 11.76 GW actually adds up to 93.01 TWh every 330 days. Perhaps the 11.76 GW is a 7-day moving average and the 93.01 TWh/year is instantaneous power consumption, or vice versa.)
Whether 11.76 GW is "an enormous amount of power" or not depends on what you're comparing it to. Total world marketed energy consumption is about 18-20 TW, so compared to world marketed energy consumption, it's not an enormous amount of power. (A terawatt is 1000 gigawatts.) Terrestrial insolation is about 130 petawatts (a petawatt is 1000 TW); about 0.3% of that falls on arable land, so agriculture uses about 350 TW of power, almost 20 times world marketed energy consumption.
Unsurprisingly, you're also mistaken about the Netherlands' power consumption, perhaps because you don't know about non-electrical forms of energy such as kinetic energy, chemical energy, and (very ironically in this context) solar energy; even their electrical energy consumption alone is 119 TWh/year, which is 13.6 GW, but most of their energy consumption is not electrical; their total energy consumption is more than 100 GW.
So, Bitcoin provides a secure digital currency to 7.8 billion people for, probably, significantly less energy than the Netherlands uses to provide electricity to 0.018 billion people. (A million is 0.001 billion.)
Is it partisanship to call that "an enormous amount of power"? Maybe, maybe not, it's a valid subjective perspective. But it's clearly partisanship to not care whether it's 12 GW or 1000 GW.