This article gets many things wrong. Starting with Bitcoin, he misunderstands what the mining process is. It’s main process isn’t just to mint new coins, which is what I think he assumes. Minting coins is an incentive to incorporate transactions into the blockchain, requiring a compute intensive lottery. Yes verifying transactions is quick, but the “per-transaction energy cost” is not misleading as the energy required to create the transaction in the first place is significant. The mining process will still be necessary after all coins have been minted.

Secondly why does he assume clean energy produced in one region can’t be exported elsewhere? China is the world’s largest coal dependent nation. Electricity does not require batteries to store and transmit large distances.