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Apart from the other ideas for picking up load, if you have land for it, then there are many productive ways to use excess generation capacity that can still be
by yourapostasy 9y ago
Apart from the other ideas for picking up load, if you have land for it, then there are many productive ways to use excess generation capacity that can still be reliable, especially if a conventional resistive load is available on standby. Some methods can even bolster the DC’s own opex. None are cheaper than a resistive load, but I wonder if the resistive load was modeled as requiring high availability, then what is the pricing of the excess capacity?
* Plasma arc garbage incineration. Not smelly if the input arrives in a ceramic sealed container.
* Glass cullet smelter producing glass foam insulation bricks. Turn excess power into additional DC modular insulation. My personal favorite, because this is a giant resistive load that directly supports the DC’s bottom line.
* Aluminum recycling smelter. Build additional heat sinks for increasing rack efficiency.
* Distilled water generation. Route it back through water chillers, cut down on mineral scaling damage over time.
- lima 9y agoThe generator is not going to run unless there's an outage.
- yourapostasy 9y agoI forgot to mention that you only need to set up for very small-scale production, almost maker-scale, so not a whole lot of land is required. With automation, any outage will create a steady trickle of usable goods. The DC's I work with run generators once a month to test (and generally, most engines don't like sitting still all the time). Certainly sufficient for use by nearby residents, so co-generation would benefit third parties if not the DC itself.