Cron at Noon

Energy for cron jobs: the grid already built the capacity AI’s background work needs. It sits idle every sunny midday.

Aleh Manchuliantsau Thomas Barrios
SF × MIT Hack Day: Energy. Track 3, manage loads.
Problem

Everyone is hunting for energy for real-time compute.

Opportunity

Cron jobs run in the background, so they don’t have to run right now.

Illustrative spring day, CAISO-like shape. Live data in the demo.

Midday surplus to tokens, live

Pick a grid region and a day. The calculator turns real grid data into energy, tokens, and dollars.

The calculator goes here Set DEMO_URL at the top of the script in this file.

Same job, cheaper hour

Simulation by Thomas Barrios on CAISO prices

4.7×

cheaper per token in the cheapest grid interval than in the priciest.

CAISO intervalGrid pricePer 1M tokens
Priciest$55.53 / MWh$1.67
Cheapest$11.73 / MWh$0.35
Example cron job: profile 150 YC companies (3M tokens)
$5.00priciest hour
$1.06cheapest hour

Model: CAISO price × 0.0006 MWh per 1M tokens (placeholder) × 50× inference markup. 33 tests pass; live CAISO OASIS data reproduces both price anchors.

What we did

  • Found energy available today for the rising demand of cron jobs.
  • Confirmed it with industry partners.
  • Confirmed it applies to other states and Canada.

Not yet

  • Talk to hyperscalers and AI labs.
76 GW

exists today

70 large nuclear reactors’ worth.

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