Therfore, there will be times of the day (in certain weather conditions) when some companies will get paid to use electricity.
The last comment on the article talks about nuclear plants pumping water to top-of-mountain reservoirs, and then using the downhill water flow to power things later; the reservoir is the power storage. A similar thing could happen here, as well. Melt salt. Boil water. Pump water up an incline. Any of those things could be used to "store" the excess power until needed. As well as batteries, of course. There may still be a tipping point where power utilities are paying people to take power away - you can only store so much, after all - but I expect it is further down the road than it looks. Power companies are devious fuckers, and will do whatever they can to hold their ground.
It doesn't even need to be a mountaintop as is the case with Ludington pumped storage in Michigan. Another thing is transmission. If you have a lot of sun it doesn't mean everyone does. It's darker to the west as the sun rises. Building wires from generation in one place to load somewhere else has a long history. It's still a question of money. Want to move power from Ohio to Indiana? Ok. Want to move it from Ohio to Oregon? Unlikely.
Of course I don't think that we will be transmitting electricity over long distances, ever. Physics just says No to that. But our current model of power generation being one big polluting building, is a relic of the Industrial Revolution, and no longer appropriate to the Space Age we live in. We need multiple sources of power working together, and distributed much more liberally across the country. With solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, battery, and clever storage solutions (like pumping water uphill, steam generation, etc.), all playing a role in power generation/storage everywhere. The only thing holding us back from this, is our fucking horrendous power grid. Fuck... let's take 30% of the Defense Budget and throw it into modernizing the entire energy grid across the USA, and training all the hundreds of thousands of people who will install, operate, service, and manage it. Heh... yeah right. These motherfuckers still think there was a child sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor... that didn't have a basement. Good fucking luck on them ever giving in to a "socialist" program like modernizing the energy grid... America is fucked.
The first comment on the article (not Devac, the actual article page) was where my mind went, except I'm not gonna use GPUs as a heatsink, I'm going to use the GPUs to do computations. But of course, that'd be institutionalized, and research might get held up until energy grid conditions were favorable. Not ideal.
Let's say you pay $.01 per CPU per hour for my Beowulf cluster if scheduled but $.005 per CPU per hour opportunistically. Your protein folding analysis is gonna take 2500 CPUs about 30 hours to run your calcs. It's gonna take you a week to get scheduled and $750 and more than a day once you're on deck. Or, It's gonna take a week to get scheduled and maybe another week (and maybe three days to run) if we're doing it when the power is cheap. You're looking at a couple weeks anyway; do you want it at the beginning of the week for $750 or the end of the week (ish) for $375? Every musician of the '70s, '80s and '90s knows the value of "cheap studio time." You can get your goofy garage band in between midnight and 4am because Fleetwood Mac has booked the whole studio for a month but they usually knock off at 4 to go blow coke up Stevie Nicks' ass so they'll never even know we were there. The cluster equivalent of "off peak pricing" will find plenty of use.