He's looking at it from a utilitarian point of view.

From that perspective, you've got a finite amount of energy that's being consumed at any point of time and by that logic, you'd be better served to use the solar energy for something else in your household that would've needed the grid, because a cloud provider will almost certainly only need a fraction of the electricity you'd need to keep the static files served.

So, by doing that you've effectively reduced your absolute energy footprint.

But these projects aren't about reducing your energy footprint. They're about having a local webserver that's running on solar energy. Or in the authors words: At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web

Yeah, it’s cool to just see what goes into it, and get a more intuitive understanding of the tradeoffs and what needs to be done to move more of this to green energy. It makes the (large) challenge of matching generation to consumption a whole lot more real. It’s obviously not meant to be a maximized carbon reduction in any way commensurate to the effort.

Yes it is not a contradiction here.

Economies of scale make cloud more efficient for basic sites like this. It is like using street lights vs. every house putting out a few candles.

In addition we love the grid! We want it to get greener. Put the effort into making the grid energy zero carbon, low pollution while still highly available.

Furthermore using that solar to say charge your work laptop and then hosting the site in CF would net use less energy.

the grid is going to continue to get efficiency and renewable energy improvements that help at a much more massive scale.

it's 1000x more helpful to just like only run your big appliances when your grid is using more renewables.

Not sure that’s true due to power losses over distance. Running your appliances off your own solar panels and not having to draw from the grid is probably more efficient in terms of energy generation.