One of the main problems of PoW networks like Bitcoin or Ethereum is its energy consumption.
Question 1: does this get solved with PoA networks?(without taking in account that these are not really suitable for public networks).
Question 2: are there any comparisons between PoW and PoA out there that look into the numbers, in terms like computational or environmental/energetic cost? For example, between an ethereum PoW blockchain and a PoA one. I haven't been able to find any.
Question 1: Yes. PoA consensus is where nodes can validate with no need for identity verification (nothing like PoW). If you are a validator in the network you can validate the new nodes. The thing is that many blockchains will do their own consensus based on PoA or PoS and will incorporate different algorithms to ensure the incentive and the reward for each validator. you can look at Quorum as an example as well as the Binance chain.
question 2: I don't know of such benchmarks, but the difference between PoA and PoW is large. you can take the metric of block-time which at some point for bitcoin, was in the 10 min region and ETH in the 2 min, while PoA blockchain can go for 2 seconds per block.
