Only true for our current computers and not true with reversible computing. With reversible computing you can use electricity to perform a calculation and then "push" that electricity back into a battery or a capacitor instead of dumping it to the environment. It's still a huge challenge, but there is a recent promising attempt:

"British reversible computing startup Vaire has demonstrated an adiabatic reversible computing system with net energy recovery"

https://www.eetimes.com/vaire-demos-energy-recovery-with-rev...

https://vaire.co/

Short introduction video to reversible computing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVmZTGeIwnc

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flave 2 days ago | parent [-]

Actually pretty cool - I was about to comment “nice perpetual motion machine” but looked into a bit more and it’s much more interesting than that (well, a real perpetual motion machine would be interesting but…)

Thanks for posting. Pretty cool.

	▲	tatjam 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		This kind of stuff could trigger the next revolution in computing, as the theoretical energy consumption of computing is pretty insignificant. Imagine if we could make computers with near-zero energy dissipation! A "solid 3D" computer would then become possible, and Moore's law may keep going until we exhaust the new dimension ;)