There are actually real adoption of blockchain applications especially in the enterprises, you can actually find more details in my recent technical report on decentralised applications adoptions in organisations.
Regarding computation speed and energy consumption, recent there has been an increased in adoption of consensus methods such as PoS that does not involve so much energy consumption and processes much more transactions within an interval. The paper discusses adoptions and existing limitations Technical Report An Exploration of Blockchain enabled Smart-Contracts Applica...
Healthcare and health sector information system interoperability is one of leading application of blockchain and smart contracts. Government is generally responsible for this sector.
Other areas include digital identity management, government process monitoring to reduce corruption etc.
Using the Blockchain for online voting might an interesting use case. Most likely, it will not be used for really important elections at first, but it can help to foster direct democracy at a regional level.