The energy question
Does Bitcoin waste energy? Look what else uses more.
Yes, Bitcoin uses electricity — about 150 TWh a year. That's real. But “uses energy” isn't the same as “wastes energy,” and the number only means something next to what else we plug in. So here it is, beside things nobody calls a crisis.
Annual electricity, in TWh
Air conditioning & cooling
Keeping rooms a few degrees cooler.
IEA, The Future of Cooling
Data centres (excl. crypto)
Ads, autoplay, the cloud, AI.
IEA, 2024
The traditional banking system
Branches, card networks, ATMs, datacentres.
Galaxy Digital, 2021 est.
Bitcoin network
A neutral, borderless, 24/7 settlement network anyone can use.
Cambridge CBECI
Gold mining
Digging metal out of the ground to lock it back in vaults.
Industry estimates
Always-on / standby devices(US)
Gadgets drawing power doing nothing, in U.S. homes alone.
U.S. DOE / LBNL est.
PC & console gaming
Fun — but nobody calls it a waste.
LBNL / industry est.
Clothes dryers(US)
Tumbling towels dry instead of hanging them — U.S. homes.
U.S. EIA / LBNL est.
Online adult content (streaming)
Streamed worldwide, every day. Useful?
The Shift Project, 2019 est. (debated)
Indoor cannabis growing(US)
Growing weed indoors under lamps — roughly 1% of U.S. power.
Mills, 2012 est. (dated)
Christmas lights(US)
Six weeks of festive glow — in the U.S. alone.
U.S. DOE est.
Too slippery to chart — too telling to skip
Some things don’t come with an honest kilowatt figure — the companies don’t disclose it, or the public estimates are all over the map. We won’t fake a bar for them. But they’re worth seeing, because nobody calls them a crisis either.
TikTok
≈ 50 Mt CO₂e / yrAbout the same carbon as the entire country of Greece — for short-form video. No official kWh figure exists, so this is in carbon, not TWh. Nobody is calling for a ban.
Greenly, 2024 est.
Video streaming (Netflix, YouTube & co.)
tens–hundreds of TWhEstimates swing wildly and are hotly contested — Netflix self-reports ~0.5 TWh; others model 90+ TWh for Netflix alone. Whatever the true figure, it's large and growing — and nobody's outraged.
IEA / The Shift Project (disputed)
Bitcoin sits in the same ballpark as gold mining and the banking system it competes with — and a fraction of what we spend keeping rooms cool or servers humming. The difference is what it buys: money no government can debase or switch off.
Win the argument
Next time someone says Bitcoin wastes energy — send them this.
Figures are best-available public estimates (TWh/year), rounded; the “× Bitcoin” multiple is each figure divided by Bitcoin’s ~150 TWh/yr (Cambridge CBECI). Methodologies vary widely — especially for diffuse uses like streaming, standby and short-form video — so treat this as an order-of-magnitude comparison, not a precise ledger. Sources: IEA (cooling, data centres, streaming), Galaxy Digital (banking), Cambridge CBECI (Bitcoin), U.S. DOE / EIA / LBNL (standby, gaming, dryers, Christmas lights), Mills 2012 (indoor cannabis), Greenly 2024 (TikTok). Each row is labelled with its own source above.