It took me time to work out where to start... Once you think it through you realise it is pretty easy and obvious. But (and this gives away my age a bit), I have not built a static webpage since school (over 10 years ago), and have become so accustomed to all the crazy shit that goes into web development today like Webpack, NPM, React, Angular etc etc that I had forgotten how to actually just serve a piece of HTML.
My dependence on all these frameworks and CLIs sent me on a quest to find out more about pure javascript, and I came across an incredible talk by a developer who created a pure javascript web app for music notation. I really wanted to link it here but cannot find it.
I have found that static generators, specifically Hugo, have made just plain HTML fun again. They give you just enough power to not repeat yourself endlessly (e.g. maintaining each page and copy-pasta all changes between them) without turning into the system's we're all trying to step back from.
Neocities? It's where I occasionally dump my static-can't-be-bothered sketches.
The effort required to produce a site like this would be negligible, given that it's almost entirely plain HTML. Dithering the images would take seconds in something like GIMP. The HTML looks to have been produced by a tool, based on the formatting, so they wouldn't need to spend time working with markup.
To illustrate, I'm going to invent some numbers:
Let's say that this site on "standard" hardware would use 1kW per day. This means the existing site saves ~950W per day looking at just the hardware energy use.
However, the hardware it's running on had to be produced, let's say that costs 10kW. The solar panels and batteries need power to make, let's; say they cost another 30kW of power.
Additionally, the system needs to be designed and built by a human being. Humans use a lot of energy. Let's say that this took 1 week to design and build. Let's say a human "uses" 50kW of "power" per day (e.g. from food production, etc.). This means it costs an additional 350kW of power to design and build the infrastructure.
Adding up all these made up numbers gives us a total infrastructure cost of 390kW. This means that, in order to "pay back" the difference, the new system has to operate for (390,000 W / 950 W/d =) 410 days.
These numbers are wildly inaccurate and cut a lot of corners, but this should give an idea as to what the grandparent was getting at.
Sidenote: I'm not, personally, trying to make a point about the project itself. Just, in order to fully understand the energy impact you have, you need to take a lot more into account than just "the amount of work performed by the computer".
1) Reducing website bandwidth and computational usage (static sites, small images, reducing extra resource requests). Super common topic that HN talks about all the time.
2) Reducing the electricity bill for the server and powering it with renewable resources. This part is quite neat, I think, but for a single bespoke website, the energy savings of using a single low-power server seems pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things — I could get similar savings by changing a living room lamp to a more energy efficient bulb.
This inspires me to propose a third category of energy efficiency that the article doesn't touch on: human energy costs.
Humans are quite energy intensive devices, and I suspect that the labor and human-maintenance costs of making this website dwarf the direct energy costs of running a webserver. I'd be curious how one would go about optimizing these other energy costs, and whether that can be done in a way that still preserves quality of work/life for the humans involved.