It's TOTALLY relevant. If you consider what a "computer" cost 40 years ago, how HUGE and power hungry it was, and how pathetically not "powerful" it was, you could have predicted some insane power consumption trends, based on current technology.
Now consider that your cell phone is 100,000 times smaller, 1,000,000 times cheaper, and 1000 times more powerful than a university-grade computer from 1965.
That's a BILLION (with a B) fold increase processing power, cost efficiency, and reduction in size in the past 47 years... Think about it.
You didn't get the point. Your billion or whatever increase in computing efficiency will just increase mining difficulty. It will not reduce energy consumption of the bitcoin network. Variable costs of mining are dominated by electricity price. Mining gear will be run as long as those costs are not higher than the expected mining reward plus transaction fees. (Amortisation has no influence on this - it's the miner's risk)
So what follows from the above is that more efficient mining gear will of course produce more GH/s per Watt. So it will be more GH/s per $ on your electricity bill. This means that it is profitable for more people to run even more mining gear. And what's profitable will be done on a free market. If such a thing as free market really exists, Bitcoin is it.
Efficiency goes up
Difficulty goes up
Energy consumption stays exactly the same.
The Energy consumption of the Bitcoin network can be approximated by the following formula:
GlobalEnergyConsumptionForMining = (MiningReward + TransactionFees) * bitcoinValueInUSD / EnergyCostInUSDperkWh
The efficiency falls out of the equation because of how a free market works
It's an interesting point. But it also assumes that miners are helpless victims to the current power companies. If you look at just the half of the equation, which is the equation you posted, it seems that way, but if you look at it from the perspective that energy costs can also drive people to move toward their own energy generation (Solar, Wind, Tidal, etc), in order to be competitive in that market, the total energy consumption isn't as relavent as the source of that energy being consumed.
If you think of the trilions of gigawatts of energy that are wasted by not harnessing the Sun's power... There's not a big issue with consuming a lot of energy.
The issue is with consuming a lot of energy generated with 20th century technology.
The day it becomes less cost-effective to generate energy with 20th century technology is the day it gets abandoned by bitcoin miners (and other consumers alike).
So if the issue is just what percentage of current power generation will look like when compared to future energy consumption, I don't really see it as a problem, provided that energy is coming from clean sources, who cares how much of it gets used?