These small-scale projects directly inspires those linked in your article to act. The more we talk about it and try to make a change--any change--the greater the impetus to make greater changes.

Large-scale projects don't magically wink into existence in a vacuum, the conversation needs to happen and the ball first needs to get rolling.

I think that seeing things like this should serve more as a point of inspiration, not a full faceted solution.

One benefit of small projects is that they give people a sense of scale, and a better mental framework for thinking about energy use. Electrical power is something we don't (usually) see or physically interact with, this project gives an idea of what a PV panel or battery that can run a tiny computer looks and feels like.

I think it's a good way of finding and demonstrating the real-life gotchas of sustainable energy. For example, I don't think most people have a good understanding of the cost-benefit calculations that go into how much renewable energy production capacity we can build while keeping to co2 emission targets, given that new capacity needs to be built with the current energy setup. The "embodied energy" aspect of this article illustrates that.

To fix problem at scale, there is a simple and elegant solution: revenue-neutral carbon tax - https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/

For real efficiency we'd need renewable feeding the grid, then massive and efficient server racks, with your tiddly website running in a docker container on there somewhere, hopefully this is on an edge node close to the person viewing the site. In other words economies of scale.

The nice thing about that is that you don't have to change the tech much, you can still use digital ocean or whatever, but they need to get their power from renewable, which in turn means their grid needs to.

The not so nice thing is we are not changing fast enough. I hope pure price pressure from tech advantages will get us from fossils to renewable.

You wouldn't have posted this if this project wasn't created. You wouldn't have discussed this with other people. It's hard to fix a big problem when most people don't even understand the problem.

One use case I imagine would be for folks that live off-grid, but still want to have some home automation. Realistically these folks are using large banks of batteries, large solar panels and big inverters, but there is no harm in optimizing the load for long run time when there are periods of low sunlight and wind.

I learnt that server power usage varies a lot on load. Didn’t consider this to be so significant before.

before you'll be able to run you need to learn to walk u know....

at least this shit is inspiring