4 ms·

A battery system would be more useful and less wasteful.

• stale2002 9y ago
  Batteries are extremely expensive, on a per Kwh basis. There aren't enough batteries in the world to recoup any significant chunk of this lost/free/extra energy. Power plants will sometimes even pay people money to accept the electricity, because too much of it has the possibility of damaging something.
  • cryptodogemoon 9y ago
    Throwing computational power at a PoW system for hash collisions is significantly more wasteful than simply reducing the cost of electricity itself or depositing the energy into a storage system for use at later in demand times. If free energy needed to be expelled and couldn't be stored for some weird reason, it could be used to grind wheat, purify water, or run scientific computing to contribute to curing diseases rather than attempt to acquire speculative database tokens.
    • stale2002 9y ago
      Tell that to the power plants who ALREADY waste this "free" electricity, by destroying it through putting into giant resistor banks. This is not "some weird reason". Thus is how the current power grid works in many locations. If your theory was correct, then negative energy rates wouldn't even exist right now. But they do.
  • philwelch 9y ago
    At a very large scale, pumping water uphill is a type of battery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...
    • PeterisP 9y ago
      Yes, but the capacity of those stations is already used (for managing daily fluctuations) and there's not that much opportunity to build more, they require very specific conditions, are costly, and have a big effect on the environment. As solar and wind grows, we will use more pumped hydro, but there won't be / can't be e.g. a tripling of it.