Thanks for pointing out that the amount of power consumed is speculative and "up to" - it's reported as a fact in the headlines everywhere. We can get a reason

Thanks for pointing out that the amount of power consumed is speculative and "up to" - it's reported as a fact in the headlines everywhere. We can get a reasonable upper bound: the block reward is 6.25 BTC + fees (the blocks I saw tended to have around 0.5 BTC in fees), so let's be generous and say 7 BTC per block. 144 blocks per day are 52560 blocks or 368k BTC per year. Currently, they're worth 47k each, so $17.3B/year. The 91 TWh figure (from https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364) seems derived directly from a 240 TWh global power consumption multiplied by the assumed % of mining happening in the US, so since we're using global revenue, it only makes sense to use the global number, 240 TWh = 240e9 kWh. 17.3e9 USD / 240e9 kWh => 7.2 ct/kWh That's the absolute maximum that electricity could cost in order for mining to be profitable. That's making some very generous assumptions - I used the current price (annual high!) instead of the much lower average over the past months or year, and it completely ignores the very significant cost of the mining hardware. But given that 7.2 ct/kWh is roughly what industrial electricity costs in the US, and miners might be able to get power cheaper (since they can be more flexible than e.g. an aluminium plant that would suffer expensive damage if power is cut unexpectedly), it's not an entirely unreasonable number for an upper bound. Getting accurate numbers through mandatory reporting isn't the worst idea, if only to prevent such bullshit headlines.