I am sometimes switching back and forth WCGrid on and off according to winter/summer and climate change developments. I understand any user can consider abstaining from crunching during heat waves on their own so as to limit the likelihood of power shortages. However, I had this idea the other day:

There could be some kind of computed guidance to help the users decide easier (or even decide on its own) when they should consider halting crunching temporarily due to those heat waves. This, I believe, would also give a little better balance to the crunching activity, as instead of one computing all the time and another person computing only in the winter, many users could compute most of the year and only halt when it is highly recommended. I can imagine three possibilities:

1. (more complex) the user would adhere to an optional automatic halting of crunching in BOINC that would be computed based on the local conditions - they could be related to temperatures, power, or even water availability, for instance (or at least the countries' or districts' trend conditions, if we don't want to get into precise location privacy issues - as a result, say, a country where the summer is particularly hot would have more halted days during the summer).

2. (simpler) the user would just get a gentle e-mail reminder suggesting to turn WCGrid off from day X to day Y, according to the summer conditions.

3. no automation at all, but including a thorough walkthrough article (or a decision-tree?) in the WCGrid website to help the user make these decisions a no-brainer.

Do you think this idea has some merit or am I completely off the mark here?