Blockchain technology and, more generally, distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems, face public scrutiny for their energy consumption levels. However, many point out that high energy consumption is a feature of (small block size) proof-of-work (PoW) DLTs, but not of proof-of-stake (PoS) DLTs. With the energy consumption of PoS systems being an under-researched area, we replicate, expand and update embryonary work modelling it and comparing different PoS-based DLTs with each other and with other non-PoS systems. In doing so, we suggest and implement a number of improvements to an existing PoS energy consumption model. We find that there may be significant differences in the energy consumption of PoS systems analysed and confirm that, regardless of these differences, their energy consumption is several orders of magnitude below that of Bitcoin Core.

翻译：区块链技术，以及更广义的分布式账本技术系统，因其能耗水平面临公众审视。然而，许多人指出高能耗是（小区块）工作量证明分布式账本的特征，而非权益证明分布式账本的特征。鉴于权益证明系统的能耗研究尚属未经充分探索的领域，我们复制、扩展并更新了初步的建模工作，对其进行分析，并比较了不同基于权益证明的分布式账本系统之间及其与非权益证明系统之间的差异。在此过程中，我们提出并实施了对现有权益证明能耗模型的若干改进。我们发现，所分析的权益证明系统在能耗上可能存在显著差异，并确认，无论这些差异如何，其能耗均比比特币核心系统低数个数量级。