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Then offsetting that cost to a cloud provider isn't any better.

450W just isn't that much power as far as "environmental costs" go. It's also super trivial to put on solar (actually my current project - although I had to scale the solar system way up to make ROI make sense because power is cheap in my region). But seriously, panels are cheap, LFP batteries are cheap, inverters/mppts are cheap. Even in my region with the cheap power, moving my house to solar has returns in the <15 years range.




> Then offsetting that cost to a cloud provider isn't any better.

Nobody made that claim

> 450W just isn't that much power as far as "environmental costs" go

It's a quarter of one's fair share per the philosophy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society

If you provide for yourself (e.g. run your IT farm on solar), by all means, make use of it and enjoy it. Or if the consumption serves others by doing wind forecasts for battery operators or hosts geographic data that rescue workers use in remote places or whatnot: of course, continue to do these things. In general though, most people's home IT will fulfil mostly their own needs (controlling the lights from a GPU-based voice assistant). The USA and western Europe have similarly rich lifestyles but one has a more than twice as great impact on other people's environment for some reason (as measured by CO2-equivalents per capita). We can choose for ourselves what role we want to play, but we should at least be aware that our choices make a difference


> My rack is currently pulling 800W and _is mostly idle_.

Emphasis mine. I have a rack that draws 200w continuously and I don't feel great about it, even though I have 4.8kW of panels to offset it.




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