Of course its a better idea to pick the version that sounds better. That's what I said; I know both are accurate.
My point is that by tying performance to environmental factors, you get a boost when things are great but then can have troubles when things are not great. Anyone familiar with solar panels already knows this, but if the correlation is obscured, it could be surprising. The article didn't mention a specific performance gain, but if we say you get an X% performance gain when the sun is out, it also means you get a similar X% performance loss when the sun is not out. Users of the system will get used to the improvement, which becomes the new standard, and then a particularly dreary season comes in with weeks of cloud cover, and suddenly there is concern about the degradation of service.
(Like I said, it's still a good idea, it's efficient use of resources, but the PR is funny, that's all.)
Encouraging and incentivizing compute/electricity demand to be time flexible provides the opportunity for cost savings and emissions reductions.
The greater the flexibility, the greater the savings when demand can be smoothed out to better allocate resources and allow easier forecasting.
If compute jobs that are run on demand can be deferred a few hours and run during a time period, that allows resources to better utilized. Like charging an EV overnight, but better.
My point is that by tying performance to environmental factors, you get a boost when things are great but then can have troubles when things are not great. Anyone familiar with solar panels already knows this, but if the correlation is obscured, it could be surprising. The article didn't mention a specific performance gain, but if we say you get an X% performance gain when the sun is out, it also means you get a similar X% performance loss when the sun is not out. Users of the system will get used to the improvement, which becomes the new standard, and then a particularly dreary season comes in with weeks of cloud cover, and suddenly there is concern about the degradation of service.
(Like I said, it's still a good idea, it's efficient use of resources, but the PR is funny, that's all.)