Is it possible to have a modified Proof of Work that does not require as much energy to secure the blockchain? As more ASICs hash away for acceptable difficulty, the difficulty keeps rising over time. Greater difficulty means to me that more electricity is used to secure the Bitcoin blockchain. Are there clever ways to modify Proof of Work, continue to use existing ASICs, spread block extraction to more miners, and continue to secure the blockchain without increasing power requirements? I'm not interested in other algorithms like Proof of Stake, Proof of Burn, etc.
No, because by design PoW is assigning relevance proportional to power usage.

If the market pays N USD per day worth of BTC to miners (in subsidy + fees combined), then the mining ecosystem will converge towards spending N USD minus profit margins. Not all of those costs go to electricity (as there are also employment and hardware costs from failure and depreciation), but a significant fraction of the costs do go to power.

It is absolutely irrelevant what the actual PoW function is, from this perspective.