We investigate the energy-constrained (EC) diamond norm distance between unitary channels acting on possibly infinite-dimensional quantum systems, and establish a number of results. First, we prove that optimal EC discrimination between two unitary channels does not require the use of any entanglement. Extending a result by Acín, we also show that a finite number of parallel queries suffices to achieve zero error discrimination even in this EC setting. Second, we employ EC diamond norms to study a novel type of quantum speed limits, which apply to pairs of quantum dynamical semigroups. We expect these results to be relevant for benchmarking internal dynamics of quantum devices. Third, we establish a version of the Solovay-Kitaev theorem that applies to the group of Gaussian unitaries over a finite number of modes, with the approximation error being measured with respect to the EC diamond norm relative to the photon number Hamiltonian.