Here's a question that's been quietly lurking in the background of every energy market discussion: what if soaring electricity costs become a permanent structural problem for inflation?

Think about it. Energy isn't just another commodity—it's baked into literally everything. Manufacturing, cooling data centers, running blockchain networks, heating homes. When power prices spike, they don't just hurt one sector. They ripple through the entire economy.

Crypto miners know this intimately. Operating margins get razor-thin when electricity costs double or triple. But it's not just mining farms feeling the squeeze. Every business that runs 24/7 infrastructure—from traditional servers to AI compute clusters—faces the same headwind.

What makes this potentially structural rather than cyclical? A few things: aging grid infrastructure in developed economies, massive capital requirements for renewable transitions, geopolitical constraints on energy supply, and persistent demand from AI and Web3 data centers that keeps climbing.

If electricity becomes a genuine bottleneck—not just temporarily expensive, but structurally constrained—then we're looking at a different inflation regime. One where energy costs don't normalize back down, they just stay elevated.

The real question isn't whether prices will go up. It's whether they'll stay up. And if they do, how does that reshape everything from token economics to traditional business models?