On this topic, most ppl yet again wind up nostril-deep in the intellectual tarpit dubbed Goodhart's Law While true that not all "energy consumption" lands on the "good" side of things, to avoid this tarpit consider another framing: To consume no energy *would be* inherently bad
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I am thinking of the de Sitter radiation, ~10^-30 K - due to cosmological constant, so in a sense fundamental. Seems unavoidable, but can be isolated at the price of literal parsecs of foil insulators. (thickness due to need to avoid near field couplings)
Even without the isolation, kT ~ 10^{-53} Joules is the scale of the energy fluctuations. The noise effects will be pretty small. I guess it's relevant and will require isolation on sufficient computational scale, but far beyond what happens on Earth today.
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At a rough guess, all digital computations done by humanity to date are probably on the order of 10^35 operations, maybe 10^40. So you could (in principle) error-correct away all noise due to de Sitter radiation as a cost of < a picojoule.
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Of course, for more serious computations - after converting, say, a galaxy to reversible computronium - the in-principle energy cost of computation absent isolation might be substantial.
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