Marvelously succinct.
My wife (@madlila) started distributed computing with SETI@home MANY years back long before it was AT ALL easy to do, because that was in the day it was too easy to leave the monitor on and burn the phosphor...and sleep/standby literally didn't exist. Electricity costs were nearly inconsequential for nearly 7 months out of the year, since electric heat was a major expense, and still is.
I jumped into it several times myself, heavily around 2008 and maybe 2012- with replacing hardware and OSes, I would drop out unintentionally- but I think this time, with a decent rig, even if it's nearly a decade old, with the overhead (1 out of 4 cores and regulated by demand by the manager) so negligible, I'm going to stick with it.
The opportunity Gridcoin offers extends far beyond simply writing off the ergs used.