[brabel]

You haven't addressed the parent commenter's point though: that PoW will cause increase of energy consumption every time you make any progress in making energy cheaper, hence cancelling out any improvements energy production efficiency.

It would only be benefitial if after a certain level of efficiency were achieved, PoW got banned and all that efficiency increase could actually benefit consumers of energy that did not have to keep increasing spend to keep up (though even that's not sure, because if energy becomes 10x cheaper, it's just a matter of time for people to invent new creative ways to use all that cheap energy that's prohebitevely expensive right now).