Throwing computational power at a PoW system for hash collisions is significantly more wasteful than simply reducing the cost of electricity itself or depositing the energy into a storage system for use at later in demand times.
If free energy needed to be expelled and couldn't be stored for some weird reason, it could be used to grind wheat, purify water, or run scientific computing to contribute to curing diseases rather than attempt to acquire speculative database tokens.
If free energy needed to be expelled and couldn't be stored for some weird reason, it could be used to grind wheat, purify water, or run scientific computing to contribute to curing diseases rather than attempt to acquire speculative database tokens.