It's good I seem to have twigged your interest to think about this, and I thank you for twigging my interest to think about the consciousness connection.
Take the case of creating a kg of hydrogen from solar by electrolysis. This is 33KWhrs removed from the potential heat energy of the sun, if it wasn't used at all, regardless of efficiency.
The same goes for every bit of information created by a digital system running from solar, every bit of information is a reduction of temperature by 0.69 x Boltzman's constant, in degrees C or K. This is bench tested to be true.
The 3D structure of a plant can be fully defined digitally. There we see the plant creates, in every case because it's directly solar powered, at least after it forms leaves.
Compare with any case of use of extracted energy. Firstly the energy has to be extracted, and this generates more heat than the heat reduction effect of any amount of creation we can do with the energy yielded.
I trust you see all of that is undisputable.