Multiple Perspectives on Bitcoin's PoW Energy Consumption

It seems like more than a few (needlessly long) articles are popping up re-hashing the energy consumption issue related to Bitcoin's Proof of Work consensus algorithm. 

A simpler way to see the issue is through bullet points of both the optimistic side as well as pessimistic side.

A few months ago the Token Economy email newsletter did just this and provided this awesome list of pessimistic/optimistic takes on Bitcoin's energy use. I'll share then with you here:

Pessimistic view:

- Bitcoin uses as much energy as 520,000 Canadians every day

- Bitcoin uses as much energy as the Democratic Republic of Congo

- Bitcoin uses more energy than 116 countries each

Optimistic view:

- The energy that Bitcoin consumes in a year would only last the U.S. for 19 hours.

- Bitcoin uses only 20% of the energy from a single coal power plant in Taiwan

- The Three Gorges Damn in China produces three times as much electricity as Bitcoin consumes

- The U.S. produces more electricity from a single Geothermal plant than Bitcoin requires

- 17 NSA Data centers together consume more electricity than Bitcoin

- Google used about double as much electricity in 2015 than Bitcoin does today

- Bitcoin miners will consume an estimated 8.27 terawatt-hours per year, but that's less than the estimated 11 terawatt-hours per year to produce the global cash and coin supply, while gold mining burns the equivalent of 132 terawatt-hours - and that doesn’t include armored trucks, bank vaults, security systems and such.