Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows

There are a few things going on here.

First we need to address the basic premise that could allow this to make sense at all in some house or environment -- that one can afford to freeze less during the day if they freeze it more at night (or vice versa).

For a fridge this is hard because you're usually targeting a narrow temperature band (don't want to accidentally freeze your veggies), but for a freezer it usually doesn't matter if you get it 10-20 degrees too hot or too cold as long as everything remains frozen. In that case, your losses (whether they're through the insulation or an open lid) will be higher with a colder freezer, so even if you could get your freezer down to e.g. -200 it might not be cost advantageous to do so, but colder temperatures definitely buy you some extra time. E.g. if normally your freezer is at -5 and you instead cool it down to -10, there will be a nonzero amount of time before it heats back up to -5 again (and the amount of time can be large if your freezer is well insulated and has a high thermal mass).

The "closed system" aspect of this is also interesting.

The cheap answer is that not all houses are heated or cooled (mine isn't), so you can sometimes ignore that part of the equation.

A better answer is that everything mostly works out the same even for closed systems. Suppose you have A/C that cools your home to a target temperature. When your freezer is running it moves heat into the living space, which then needs to be moved outside. As a system, you can pretend those two units are working together to move that same quantity of heat outside, and when the freezer is off you're just not operating that entire heat pumping system (assuming linear power demands and a host of other things to make the example tractable in a comment). While the freezer is off it will also assist in cooling the room down, further alleviating A/C power demands during peak hours (not alleviating them much, but helping nonetheless).

If you're instead heating the room to a target temperature, everything works a bit in reverse. The freezer alleviates heating costs while it's running and exacerbates them while it's off (and critically, it exacerbates them more than if you assumed a constant, low power draw because we're intentionally decreasing it's temperature below a typical freezer level and thus increasing the rate at which heat will enter it from the apartment by some small amount). Assuming you were trying to run the freezer during low cost hours, that effect might be large enough to offset any gains. I doubt it, but that's just a hunch, and I haven't run any hard numbers yet.

I think Griddy is a cool idea but only if you have something to automatically cut your usage when the price spikes to $9 per kWh like it did last summer.

This documentary is without nuance and without pragmatism. And it criticizes without proposing a path forward -- it's a bunch of cheap pot-shots, and it demands perfection instead of proposing progress.

Yes, there are valid criticisms. Wind turbines are made of unrecyclable fiberglass. It takes energy to build them (truck rolls to the site, concrete for the foundations), and it's important to make sure the energy return on energy invested is net positive. We use fossil fuels to produce these renewables technologies. That's all true, but not insurmountable.

They say battery storage makes up only a tiny percent of the needed capacity to overcome renewable intermittency. Sure, but it also omits how solar has dropped two orders of magnitude in price over the last few decades as we've built more of it and gotten better at making them (the "learning curve").

It follows a group of Vermont hikers hiking to a wind turbine site and then being NIMBY about it, but none of them talk about where their energy SHOULD come from.

Look, it raises a lot of critical questions. But it also seems to expect a single magic pill that just doesn't exist. 2/3's of the way through they talk about the misrepresentations in biomass and point out how many organizations seem to be both for it and against it. "Which side are they really on?" says the classic accusatory documentary voiceover with scary music. Well, it's complicated! Clearly you don't want to burn all the forests all at once. And yeah, if you burn pressure-treated wood, those chemicals go into the local community. At the same time, wood does grow back. The nuance that's missing in this documentary is questions like "how many acres of rotationally-harvested woodlands are required to power a 1MW biomass plant sustainably in perpetuity? And can such projects exist in practice?"

Biomass isn't a panacea solution, and the HN startup mindset of "can I scale up a technology to dominate everything" doesn't apply because biomass has limits to it's scalability. It's just one of many tools, and the problem about this documentary is it can't envision a future where many tools are used together. When a Sierra Club exec is questioned about biomass, they kept the part where she says their "position is nuanced", but then they cut to something else without explaining that nuance. That's lazy documentary filming.

The complicated thing about energy is there is no silver bullet. This documentary finds the bad in each technology without considering how all the pieces could fit together. It presents the bad sides of each technology as if that should disqualify the tech instead of asking how can we improve each over time. There aren't easy answers to these questions, but this documentary just wallows in how bad everything is without asking the hard questions about how things can be made to work or what the alternative of doing nothing is.

Thing is, Google requires an absolutely stupid amount of computing resources for running their core business. YouTube transcoding is a great example and a big one for sure, but I bet they have even bigger ones in there somewhere. I have no real data to base this on (and I'm sure nobody does), but I'd bet 5:1 odds that if Google were an AWS customer, they'd be bigger than all the others combined.

So in that case, optimizing for a single customer makes perfect sense if it's the right customer.

There are even open protocols used in the wild. SunnyHome has it working for example for using your local solar electricity.