If someone in place A with cheap, stranded power enters the mining business, the difficulty of bitcoin mining will increase, and perhaps enough to convince a miner in place B to exit, and thus free up some energy there to use in another productive endeavour. Be that for computation or for a different use.
In this sense bitcoin mining acts a bit like a pneumatic system to 'move power around' in a virtual sense.
I specifically use pneumatic as the analogy, and not hydraulic, because hydraulic fluids are incompressible.
My example assumed for the sake of simplicity that people starting bitcoin mining in A would drive up hash rate and thus difficulty enough to make mining unprofitable on the margin in some place B.
The electricity used for mining in B before can now either be used for something else, or the people in B can produce less electricity and save on resources.
Which means Bitcoin mining is a virus searching and consuming as much cheap energy as possible.
We are not at a point we're the margin is so small that we see consumption/mining shifting. We only see consumption and more consumption.
And of course this totally decentivie making the energy usable through things like high voltage DC lines or metal smelting or even making hydrogen.
Eg it used to be profitable to mine on your PC. Those days are long past: the returns don't cover the cost of electricity. Hence a shift away from that.
See https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption for an estimate of bitcoin power usage. It's going down as well as up.