That seems unconvincing. In fact how much energy is required per hash is something that's really quite easy to measure accurately. At any given time there are no more than a few dozen hardware platforms in use (they get priced out rapidly, everyone is running the newest stuff in the BTC world). Just plug them in and measure them.
All that's left from there is to come up with second order corrections about stuff like grid efficiency. But we absolutely know to quite high precision how many joules were spent to produce the coins we observe to have been created.
That seems unconvincing. In fact how much energy is required per hash is something that's really quite easy to measure accurately. At any given time there are no more than a few dozen hardware platforms in use (they get priced out rapidly, everyone is running the newest stuff in the BTC world). Just plug them in and measure them.
All that's left from there is to come up with second order corrections about stuff like grid efficiency. But we absolutely know to quite high precision how many joules were spent to produce the coins we observe to have been created.