  Living systems have evolved to efficiently consume available energy sources
using an elaborate circuitry of chemical reactions which, puzzlingly, bear a
strict restriction to asymmetric chiral configurations. While autocatalysis is
known to promote such chiral symmetry breaking, whether a similar phenomenon
may also be induced in a more general class of configurable chemical systems --
via energy exploitation -- is a sensible yet underappreciated possibility. This
work examines this question within a model of randomly generated complex
chemical networks. We show that chiral symmetry breaking may occur
spontaneously and generically by harnessing energy sources from external
environmental drives. Key to this transition are intrinsic fluctuations of
achiral-to-chiral reactions and tight matching of system configurations to the
environmental drives, which together amplify and sustain diverged enantiomer
distributions. These asymmetric states emerge through steep energetic
transitions from the corresponding symmetric states and sharply cluster as
highly-dissipating states. The results thus demonstrate a generic mechanism in
which energetic drives may give rise to homochirality in an otherwise totally
symmetrical environment, and from an early-life perspective, might emerge as a
competitive, energy-harvesting advantage.
