Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
Optimizing for this is a perfect task to throw at a simple market. Especially because actually reworking the software to take advantage of resources at different times is often going to require a decent amount of work by engineers.<p>One way to do it would be assign various jobs a value, (which could be dynamic e.g. it might get more important as information becomes stale) and have them bid on compute power. You could make the value virtual.<p>Or you could use real money. This is the premise behind EC2's spot instances. So when power is abundant, your prices drop and the relevant jobs kick off.<p>Using real market prices makes sense especially if you're renting out computing power, most customers will be happy to adjust workloads to save money.<p>Even if it's entirely internal, it's good to have a facility to "optimize for cost" and then report the savings. That's helpful to get the engineering resources devoted towards it, because "I saved $X" is a great bullet point to put in anyone's promotion packet or to base a bonus on.