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paulfchristiano comments on Superintelligence Reading Group - Section 1: Past Developments and Present Capabilities - Less Wrong
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Another way to get at the same point, I think, is - Are there things that we (contemporary humans) will never understand (from a Quora post)?
I think we can get some plausible insight on this by comparing an average person to the most brilliant minds today - or comparing the earliest recorded examples of reasoning in history to that of modernity. My intuition is that there are many concepts (quantum physics is a popular example, though I'm not sure it's a good one) that even most people today, and certainly in the past, will never comprehend, at least without massive amounts of effort, and possibly even then. They simply require too much raw cognitive capacity to appreciate. This is at least implicit in the Singularity hypothesis.
As to the energy issue, I don't see any reason to think that such super-human cognition systems necessarily requires more energy - though they may at first.
I am generally quite hesitant about using the differences between humans as evidence about the difficulty of AI progress (see here for some explanation).
But I think this comparison is a fair one in this case, because we are talking about what is possible rather than what will be achieved soon. The exponentially improbable tails of the human intelligence distribution are a lower bound for what is possible in the long run, even without using any more resources than humans use. I do expect the gap between the smartest machines and the smartest humans to eventually be much larger than the gap between the smartest human and the average human (on most sensible measures).