This was answered a few years ago. iNat’s no longer at Cal Academy, but the training machines we use to train our models are in a place that claims to be 100% sourced from renewable energy. Training does take up a fair amount of energy, but unlike querying LLMs (eg Chat GPT), querying the iNat model for ID suggestions is very low energy.
Here’s an answer from Alex Shepard, one of our engineers, about energy used for training a natural language search model: https://www.inaturalist.org/comments/15470892