[danhor]

As the local machine is there anyway, only the increase in energy usage should be considered, while the server only exists for this use case (distributed across all users).

The local machine is usually also highly constrained in computing power, energy (when battery driven) and thermals, I would expect the compute needed to be very different. The remote user will happily choose a large(r) model, while for the local use case a highly optimized (small) model will be chosen.