Bitcoin network is an enemy of electricity consumption and its effects are beginning to be seen worldwide.
Currently, the global consumption of the Bitcoin network is 60.45 TWh, information taken by real time of the University of Cambridge. Consumption that exceeds the total consumption of all Switzerland and Kuwait individually.
Bitcoin network electricity consumption
Also, at the last 6 months Bitcoin electricity comsumption increases almost 8% and will continues to rise for the 2020.
Bitcoin Electricity consumption in 2019 July:
And Bitcoin Electricity consumption in 2019 December:
Source: https://www.cbeci.org/comparisons/
The high energy consumption is due to the computational operations to find the right hashes to the transactions. Which, due to the global demand for bitcoin transactions and the increase in the acceptance of cryptocurrencies by the population in general, has been necessary to increase the number of bitcoin farms and mining pools globally.
Currently the mining hardware requires a greater amount of hashes per second to be able to find mining blocks, which means more powerful equipment, with more Th/s to make the activity profitable.
A negative environmental impact
Although the negative impact of excessive energy consumption has already been discussed, other options have been explored to generate less impact, such as using clean energy sources in generating electricity, equipment with higher hashes performance and lower energy consumption, among other options.
These options have practically remained in theory due the demand of the activity, which is greater than any source of research, however it is expected that in the course of the months and next years there will be an acceptable solution.
Is there an alternative?
Unfortunately there are a lot of people who makes bitcoin transactions, and each of these transactions requires the creation of new blocks to place them into the blockchain.
The environment problem will be a big problem for a long time.