Life Uses Energy

on Using Energy:

Spores and plant seeds go through periods of dormancy when they do not consume energy. Clearly, upon resuming activity, they are alive. Does something count as alive during dormancy? Is a dormant seed still alive because it has the potential to germinate (and consume energy again) at some time in the future? How is this potential to germinate evaluated? Living things constantly cast off dead cells (skin cells, etc.) -- only some have the potential to spawn into new life.

The list of living/nonliving things on DefinitionOfLife was made before it was specified that life maintains its structure by expending energy, and that changes things slightly. So, for instance, viruses maintain themselves by producing copies, but this is done entirely using the host's energy directly, whereas definitely living things collect and transform the necessary energy. Does this lack of metabolism impact the status of viruses?

A more important is that the inclusion of energy restricts life to universes with a thermodynamic structure like ours. Life is that uses energy to maintain its entropy. When talking about computer programs, cellular automata, or the like, the second has parallels, but the first generally does not. So this definition of active maintenance will not apply. This is not necessarily a weakness of the definition, just something worth noting.

What does it mean to "use energy"? Energy is never created or destroyed. Does it mean that life transforms energy of its environment to a higher (more disorganized) state of entropy?