Argentina doesn't use that much compared to much smaller countries with much smaller populations like Netherlands or even smaller populations like Norway. In fact the same article you probably saw that info in also mentions that standby electronics in US alone could power the network for a year.
I bet the stock markets and trading uses massively more.
Never understood the need to save energy if you can get it from renewables or similar.
P.S - Solar is pretty danm reliable, until Jan I was living off it for the almost 4 years. Obviously alone it's not enough for bitcoin though.
The machinery around the financial markets keeps the global economy running, and is built to be as efficient as possible. It's not just equity markets, but the myriad other products and derivatives that businesses use daily to manage their operations that deliver enormous value to every economy in the world..not to mention the direct employment in the finance industry.
Bitcoin is
deliberately massively inefficient and wazzes huge amounts of energy up the wall, to run a simple ledger that right now primarily serves as a token for speculators, and bugger all else.
You would struggle to design a system
more inefficient than Bitcoin.
For the record I think blockchain tech is a useful technology and businesses will make use of it in valuable ways....but Bitcoin is just a huge mistake that is only the defacto mother of all crypto because it was the first. Sooner or later I think it will go in the bin, and other, better, efficient, useful blockchain implementations will rise to prominence.