Honestly, the "can't win, can't break even" metaphor helped.

Seriously, you're brushing off entropy like it's just another engineering problem? The laws of thermodynamics aren't guidelines we can innovate our way out of, they're the absolute rules of the game. Every energy conversion, no matter how efficient, dumps waste heat into the environment, and that directly caps how much useful work we can extract. What happens when we hit that ceiling and our demand keeps growing, just throw more solar panels at it and hope the planet cools itself?