Consider a blinking light. Its blinks can be in a pattern. For example, in Morse code, this pattern of five blinks of varying long and short length: long-short-long-short-long, means "Hello"; and these five: short-long-short-long-short, means "Goodbye".

The energy itself is not the data -- it is only the carrier of the data. If we blink a tiny flashlight in the "Hello" pattern, and then blink the exact same pattern with a gigantic 100,000 watt searchlight that lights up the whole sky, the energy would be vastly different, but the data would be the same.

We could also honk a car horn in that pattern. Or build a smoky fire and send "smoke signals" in that pattern. It is not the amount of the energy or the kind of the energy that matters, it is the fact that it is changing with a pattern, and also that the pattern has some significance to a human mind (eg, "Hello").

Thus, the pattern of the energy is the data, and the nature, amount, and characteristics of the energy that carries it is almost irrelevant as long as the pattern can be observed in it.