Currently it stands at 250kWh per transaction. My two person household in a developed country with lots of appliances uses 6 Bitcoin transactions per year in electricity. Bitcoin eletricity uses is insanity and it's only set up to rise.
We're not going to stay in that relatively narrow band for long though, with the growth of this thing. There's only so much "spare" on the grid, off-peak, and this whole thing relies on wasteful means of energy production, storage and transmission.
So on one hand (hopefully) the opportunity to scavenge for cheap CPU cycles is going to contract, while the market for bitcoin expands? Yikes.
> transaction fees that are charged to the customer by the Bitcoin network have skyrocketed this year,
topping out at close to $20 a transaction last week (compared to roughly $0.20 when we initially enabled Bitcoin).