Not exactly. It’s easier to secure renewable energy for centralised entities, it’s easier to deliver it to a single place with reduced loss, and it’s easier to consume less energy by designing dedicated hardware for the purpose, as opposed to using consumer or used enterprise devices, which is what usually happens with Storj.
@Toyoo is right when the SNO uses an enterprise hardware to build a node. I think it mostly professional SNO who do so.
Our initial intention and we always trying to attract attention to it - you should use the existing online hardware. In this case you would have only pluses, include not increasing the power consumption with a degree as with a professional hardware, no expenses, only profit (you learn something new, your hardware is still working and you have an income).
Of course it will consume a little more energy than without a node, your hardware would wearing a little bit faster (from the other hand - it was working anyway and was not used) and so on. However, the resulting consuming in such case should be less than a new datacenter.
And we have an article how to use a renewable energy to run nodes: https://support.storj.io/hc/en-us/articles/360026944452-A-renewable-energy-powered-Storj-farm