Las vegas called, they want you to know they have the brightest and most energy consuming lightsource* in the world blasting at the sky, drawing fambling addicts like a moth to a flame.
*excluding laser research laboratories and weapons.
The luxor light was originally 39 Xenon bulbs running at 7 kW each. 243 kW wasn't that much energy to start, but they actually run only half the bulbs now on a rotating basis. So about 120 kW.
The light costs about $51 an hour. Arguably the smallest expense involved in running a casino hotel 24 hours a day. Less than a rounding error.
They cut back to half-brightness not because of money, or energy, but because they thought the light pollution was a little excessive.
The strip is mostly solar-powered so the Luxor is basically just taking sunlight and beaming it back up into the sky.
It's not like you could take that energy and ship it elsewhere, or do something more productive with it. The Strip's solar plant exists because of The Strip. If the Strip didn't exist then you'd just have sunlight hitting rocks in the middle of the desert like everywhere else in Nevada.
Oh, and moths to a flame? That's literal. There's an entire ecosystem built up around the moths who flock to the Luxor, the bats that eat those moths, and the owls that eat those bats.
I didn't encourage or discourage gaming. Also, mining means stressing the GPU 24-7, gaming is occasional. ... if you're gaming 24-7, then please stop doing that to, it's not good for your physical and emotional well-being :-(
In reality most mining happen with under-clocked GPU cores (and admittedly overclocked VRAM), and at very stable temperatures. The GPU that is used 24/7 for mining will be far less stressed than a GPU that is powered on and off, and cycles through a lot of thermal changes throughout the day
