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I don't truly understand this "problem". I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially. However I believ

I don't truly understand this "problem". I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially. However I believe there are plenty of "goods" (irrespective of if they are bulk materials, or partially processed products) which have a high processing energy per volume ratio (this does not need to be recoverable stored energy). Allow me to give an example: currently we have a drought in Belgium (or at least Flanders). We are not landlocked, there is plenty of water in the sea. Desalination is energy intensive. Instead of only looking at energy storage, why can't we increase the processing capacity (more desalination sites capable of working in parallel), and desalinate say sea water during the energy flood? I don't expect this to be an ideal real world example, only a pattern for identifying such examples: any product (could be composite parts, or bulk material) which is relatively compact and has some high energy per product volume processinng step. Just do the process (desalination, welding some part to another part...) when the sun shines, and store them for later. Products with very high step energy density are good candidates for storing, and could help flatten daily variations, and perhaps even seasonal variations! Now some companies would prefer avoiding risk if they don't have guaranteed orders far enough into the future, then perhaps there should be a market for insurance or loans, so that the company is encouraged to take the risk, instead of wasting the cheap energy...

verisimilitude 8y ago
I believe aluminum is nicknamed "solid electricity" due to the ore purification process or somesuch; which dovetails well with the strategy you outline here!
- bluGill 8y ago
  Unfortunately it doesn't. Aluminum needs a lot of electricity, but it needs to be consistent for several hours. It takes a lot of energy true, but the furnaces need to be at operating temperature. You can't just turn them on and off, there are startup and cool down times that need to be accounted for.
  - docker_up 8y ago
    Current furnaces do. But what if you changed the manufacturing process as well so that maybe the yield isn't as high but it's essentially "for free" in terms of electricity?
    - mercutio2 8y ago
      What you’re proposing is synonymous with “let’s make unobtainium with our spare electricity!” If we could make anodes which weren’t destroyed by falling to a low temperature, we’d already be doing it.
  - russdill 8y ago
    You might be able to add a separate process where salt gets melted, stored, and used to heat furnaces.
  - rstuart4133 8y ago
    > Aluminum needs a lot of electricity, but it needs to be consistent for several hours. Then Aluminium smelting is an excellent match for wind and solar. Quoting https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00529986/file/paper_Billund_2003.pdf https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-0052998... "Typical numbers in accuracy are an RMSE of about 10- 15% of the installed wind power capacity for a 36 hour horizon."
    - jmmcd 8y ago
      If I understand right, that figure is measuring the accuracy of a prediction of electricity production, not the constancy of the production. We can't smelt aluminium with no power even if we have predicted that there'll be no power.
      - rstuart4133 8y ago
        To be honest I don't know, but I do know taking advantage unpredictable power of this sort is why Aluminium plants are built in the first place. Where I live they are paired with coal fired plants. The reason they are paired with coal fired plants is coal can't change it's output fast enough to match the somewhat unpredictable changes in electricity usage. So the coal plant needs someone who will buy power when it's cheap, and not use (much) when its expensive. Apparently an Aluminium smelter fits the bill nicely. I presume it uses enormous of amounts of power to disassociate the Al(OH)3 but needs only a small amount of power to keep the pots at operating temperature which is not particularly surprising as the pots can be thermally insulated. Maybe the above claim that Aluminium can't tolerate rapid changes in available electricity is true, but it sounds odd. Coal fired plants often "trip out" - meaning the generator drops off line without warning. This is an unpredictable change that happens much faster than the sort of unreliability we see from renewables - it's a huge change that happens in milliseconds. And it's not uncommon: https://leadingedgeenergy.com.au/coal-fired-generators-trip/ https://leadingedgeenergy.com.au/coal-fired-generators-trip/ Again, the Aluminium plants seem to cope with this extreme unreliability just fine.
- leggomylibro 8y ago
  Haha, I like that description a lot. You can even make small batteries out of little more than aluminum, an electrolyte like salt, and (I think) a way to bring oxygen to the cathode like activated charcol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  About ten years ago I read a paper describing a pilot plant in 1950's Norway that was electrowinning iron from sulfide ore. I think the energy usage was 4-5kwh/kg. Roughly the reason it's not economic is electricity nominally costs about 5 times what coal/nat gas does. And with the current carbon footprint of the grid it probably doesn't reduce CO2 emissions. But that could change with as clean grid that has wild daily price swings. Electrowinning iron and other metals could easily soak up excess power.
- gene-h 8y ago
  There are some aluminum plants in Germany that do this[1] More ambitiously ARPA-E has a program where one of the goals is light metal production(aluminum, magnesium,etc) using variable energy sources[1]. One of the interesting possibilities they present in the program is being able to use molten metal produced in refining as an energy storage medium. Although I couldn't find any program participants doing this one is using thermal energy storage for metal production[2]. A fair amount of metal refining processes need high amounts of heat and heat can be stored easier than electricity at scale. [0]https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/german-firm-turns-aluminum-smelter-into-huge-battery https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/german-firm-tur... [1]https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/METALS_ProgramSummary.pdf https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/documents/file... [2]https://arpa-e.energy.gov/?q=slick-sheet-project/high-temperature-thermal-storage-light-metal-production https://arpa-e.energy.gov/?q=slick-sheet-project/high-temper...
mtgx 8y ago
If they can produce so much cheap energy, doesn't that balance out with the more expensive batteries they have to buy? (which will only get cheaper in the years to come)
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  there is the crucial difference that batteries wear out, so you have to buy new batteries. storage space for products or bulk matteer does not typically wear out (or not nearly as fast).
jabl 8y ago
Desalination is AFAIK energy AND capital intensive, so it's very expensive having such equipment sitting around doing nothing until energy prices fluctuate low enough. Now, there are situations where demand response makes economic sense; just not enough by far to balance a huge amount of variable renewables.
ethagknight 8y ago
With your desal example, I think a bulk of the energy requirement for desalination is building a pressure differential. That seems like it would be very easy to parallelize.. you don't need full on duplicative Desalination sites, you just need pressure vessels that can store large amounts of compressed air to take advantage of energy gluts.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  I thought they used electricity to deionize salt water, the salts are already dissociated into positive and negative ions, so pass a current through the water, and every now and then raise the electrodes out, mechanically scrape it off or reverse current in dump brine to remove the ions...
  - amluto 8y ago
    Doesn’t work. By the time you’ve moved any non-negligible amount of ions, you’ve built up an insane amount of charge and hence voltage. That voltage will be impossible to work with, not to mention many orders of magnitude higher than the voltage needed to split water into H2 and O2. One mole of singly charged ions is ~1e5 Coulombs. At an insanely high capacitance of 1 Farad (which you’ll never see in such an application) that’s 100kV of static charge by the time you move a few grams of salt. This is why you essentially never encounter ions by themselves.
    - mikec3010 8y ago
      Could you store electrical energy this way more efficiently than pumped hydroelectric? Like make a capacitor the size of a wastewater storage tank?
      - logfromblammo 8y ago
        Wouldn't it self-discharge? And at that size, also blow itself up?
      - amluto 8y ago
nostrademons 8y ago
It's likely a short-term problem. There are plenty of ways to fix it (besides the one you mention, just shut down coal & oil power plants for good and replace them with technologies like natural gas or hydro that can easily react to spikes in demand), but all of the fixes require capital investments and time to build factories & tooling. Basically this is a problem because a bunch of existing incumbents are probably going to go bankrupt, or at least have to write down a lot of capital equipment and invest in new technologies. Boo-hoo for the incumbents, but it's good for consumers and good for society.
- mac01021 8y ago
  Is the responsiveness of an oil plant so different from a natural gas plant? Why? They're both essentially a furnace fueled by a flow of combustible fluid, right?
  - mechagodzilla 8y ago
    They are similar, but outside of small islands few people use oil for power generation due to the high cost compared to natural gas.
  - chronomex 8y ago
    Natgas is a turbine engine directly; coal and oil uses a boiler running a steam turbine.
  - jabl 8y ago
    NG plants tend to use gas turbines, which can ramp very quickly indeed. Steam plants are a lot slower (thermal stresses and whatnot). Very little electricity is produced with oil, BTW. Steam plants are usually coal or nuclear.
    - hectormalot 8y ago
      Note: many bigger gas plants are combined cycle, the exhaust of the gas turbine generates steam in a waste heat boiler for a steam turbine. Often multiple GTs on a single ST.
ragebol 8y ago
I think that usually, stuff like desalination plants aren't over-dimensioned but are built to consume some known amount of power. There's nothing to consume near-free power because that capacity would sit idle the vast majority of time.
filleokus 8y ago
I guess this will maybe emerge in the future if the trend continues and is fairly steady. The problems I see is that the capital cost of many of the most energy demanding processes are such that they only make sense to run almost 24/7, and if the cheap electricity is only available 8/5 (or something) the economics might not work out. Maybe there are some applications out there that are cheap enough for this to be sustainable.
xigma 8y ago
You "currently" have a drought, but otherwise you have plenty of water, so a desalination plant isn't a wise investment (yet). Also keep in mind that these are energy spikes that cause negative prices, whereas most industrial uses need a constant and even supply. These spikes are countered by periods of little to no energy. This is the biggest problem with (most) renewables, they cannot entirely replace coal or nuclear energy for that reason. Energy storage (at cost) is an unsolved problem.
- fixermark 8y ago
  > Energy storage (at cost) is an unsolved problem. Super-true. It's actually pretty fascinating how it's currently done in the grid; storage of energy is often done by converting it (at significant efficiency loss) to a mechanical format. Those formats can get very creative---traditional is "pump a bunch of water uphill into an artificial reservoir," but in areas where big dry mines are available, capping the mine and pressurizing the air inside is also used, which feels super-weird but apparently works?
  - viraptor 8y ago
    I've never heard of this before and it sounds really cool. CAES on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storag... UK project: https://www.storelectric.com/technology/ https://www.storelectric.com/technology/
  - icebraining 8y ago
    Also, huge flywheels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_storage_power_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_storage_power_system
- Spooky23 8y ago
  They will slowly eat away at base loads and lower costs. In the meantime, you address marginal demand at a lower cost.
- kaybe 8y ago
floatrock 8y ago
Capital costs vs. marginal costs. You're going to build a $100M desalination plant and run it for three hours a day? That's a ton of money sitting idle most of the day, far more than what is recovered with zero operating costs. (This is called the utilization factor -- how long a piece of equipment is used vs. staying idle) Ideally you want useful processes with low capital costs and expensive marginal/energy costs. Desalination is not one of those.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  Yes, depending on the timescale considered, the utilization factor of the plant should be weighed against the utilization factor of flood energy. In the long run it should pay itself back.
  - woodpanel 8y ago
    > In the long run it should pay itself back. So in financial terms wouldn't this mean a rather weak profit margin? Plus the relatively high-risk that flood energy might not always result in free or negative energy prices gives it a bleak risk-to-profit ratio. In other words, there would always be something more utilizable to be done with excess energy (e.g. mining bitcoins etc. and buy water with it when you need it). PS: But I like the main point you make, to take in more aspects when calculating efficient renewable energy systems. Not a crypto-investor (or even believer).
    - DoctorOetker 8y ago
      Right, I explicitly mentioned not really believing desalination to be a good example, I was using it more as a fake illustrative example. In hindsight I should have ended with posing the following question: how do we make a simple guide for factory/etc operators/consultants to recognize such steps in their production line? Desalination is a bad example, because you need a complete new plant, while it is conceivable that other products have one or more energy dense steps. What should such instructions look like? Follow the product through your production line, and at each step measure the energy consumed per part at the step, and the volume per part when efficiently stacked. Also note if the step is automated or needs a human, if it is human, check if it can be automated. If it is automatable, and the energy density for the step is high enough, calculate the cost for changing the production line, allocating sufficient storage, and possibly automating a certain task, and parallellizing the step such that it can be run during energy flood. Then calculate through the price difference how fast it pays itself back. Mention the importance of actually measuring the energy consumption, instead of just reading off a machine specification of wattage, and cycle time. Etc. Edit: The banks that wish to invest in cheapening such a step could train consultants and send them to factories interested in good deals. I.e. any potential profit is shared between company and bank, and the bank takes the risk (hence has the motivation to do the calculation properly, and will have best knowledge through experience of suitable step energy densities)
dalbasal 8y ago
I imagine something like this would happen, if this is a "real" economic phenomenon rather than a quirky price/billing system. I think that it's something like that though, a goof in a not-quite-designed collection of old energy funding/billing setups and newer green energy stuff. Otherwise there'd be someone just consuming electricity for pay. I don't think this is "retail."
- rpearl 8y ago
  the point is that "just consuming" the electricity is nontrivial. Suppose you've been paid to take some number of megawatt hours of energy. Okay: What do you do with it? At the least useful, you have to safely convert it into heat it without damaging something. More useful would be storing it. If you know how to solve that, yeah, you will make money.
  - dalbasal 8y ago
    I don't think it's that difficult, depending on how much power you're talking about. You could literally attempt to boil the ocean, if you want to be ambitious. Heat your pool, for a domestic application.
    - rpearl 8y ago
      Okay, go for it then. Good luck!
thinkcontext 8y ago
If you wait for power prices to be negative (or merely lower than usual) you are not getting an economic return on the money you put into the desalination plant when it is not running. Think about it, if you get a 100M Euros loan to make a desalination plant, how long will it take to pay that off if you only run your plant a few hours per day vs 24 hours per day. Whether it makes economic sense depends on the difference in power prices, the capacity factor, and the ratio to capital cost. Germany has been attempting to make it work by turning the surplus electricity into hydrogen gas (and then maybe to something else, methane, diesel, ammonia, etc) by splitting water.
- azeotropic 8y ago
  More like 1 hour every 4 days in Germany, if I'm counting the number of hours YTD correctly.
  - thinkcontext 8y ago
    Well, I did also say low not just negative.
- rapnie 8y ago
  Yes, hydrolysis could be a good solution. Create hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen could also be used in hydrogen cars that we have been talking about for decades.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- dwd 8y ago
  http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-08/hydrogen-fuel-breakthrough-csiro-game-changer-export-potential/10082514?pfmredir=sm http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-08/hydrogen-fuel-breakthr... Ammonia would be preferrable as it is carbon-free and readily liquified.
  - 8y ago
TomK32 8y ago
time to spin up some giant flywheels.
istjohn 8y ago
I suspect it would be difficult to find an energy-intensive process with sufficiently low capital costs that it would make sense to only operate--recouping some of the costs--when energy rates are negative.
yayana 8y ago
I think Pumped Hydroelectric Storage is what you are looking for. I've seen a few of them here in Switzerland. I think many were originally built out with the train system's grid for it's reliably scheduled low and high capacity times. http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/pumped-hydroelectric-storage http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/pumped-...
- gamegoblin 8y ago
  Does Belgium (OPs example) have the geography necessary to support pumped hydro? Your example, Switzerland, is significantly more mountainous than Belgium.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    I know of at least one pumped storage dam in Belgium, in the mountainous southern part (Wallonia)
  - yvdriess 8y ago
    Wallonia has at least one pumped hydro that I know of. There were plants for a 'energy island' 300MW hydro plant at sea, near the large-scale wind farms. The idea is the same, pump sea water up an artificial horse-shoe shaped island. A nice bonus is that you can play with the tides as well. The height difference does not have to be great, if you can compensate with a large surface area. As far as I know, those plans were shelved. A quick googling says that similar concepts are being considered for interconnected dutch/danish wind farms.
  - markvdb 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coo-Trois-Ponts_Hydroelectric_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coo-Trois-Ponts_Hydroelectric_... It has 1164MW capacity, with ~1000GWh/year supplied.
- petre 8y ago
  Also flywheel storage. Eg: http://schwungrad-energie.com/schwungrads-success-eu-horizon-2020-programme/ http://schwungrad-energie.com/schwungrads-success-eu-horizon...
weberc2 8y ago
Bitcoin mining. This may or may not be a sincere suggestion.
- dgacmu 8y ago
  Same flaw as the other ideas - mining is very capital intensive. You can use mining in a demand response capacity, but it's best used when you can run it 98% of the time and shut down during the most expensive 2%. If you look at some of the data from Australia, peak cost per MW can go really high. It's also an environmental travesty, but that's already the case.
  - nukemandan 8y ago
    Remember that the alternative at the moments is literally pumping that energy into the ground as waste heat. I think that renewable resources otherwise wasted being used for mining instead of that seems like a win-win.
    - dgacmu 8y ago
      It takes resources - a lot of them, including energy - to build the miners. It's a net loss if you can't run the miners at a sufficient duty cycle. Cheap mining power is about 4c per kwh. A $350 GPU at 200W (hand-waving) takes about 20c/day to operate. At $70/year of power, and maybe a useful life of 3 years, it's actually capital-dominated.
      - nukemandan 8y ago
        True- so if you lived in a zone with negative price, then you would throttle your GPUs otherwise and only go full throttle when you literal get paid to use the power. But duty cycle just for that would be low... I would need to look more at the stats. But if full time operation on average over the year was closer to (or less than) $0 for power usage, could you net a profit over the life cycle? I would surely hope so!
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
kaybe 8y ago
To reverse the process we can then run an osmosis power plant and have a way to store energy. I'm sure someone out there already ran the numbers.
matthewmcg 8y ago
Interesting thought. In Richard Rhodes new book Energy, he describes how an early iron smelting works in England, faced with temporarily low demand due to a recession, rolled its excess iron into railroad tracks which could be re-used for other purposes once demand recovered: Richard Reynolds, who managed the Darbys’ Ketley ironworks, near Coalbrookdale, in the 1760s, introduced cast-iron plates and then cast-iron rails to protect the wooden rails from wear and tear or to replace them. He had another reason as well for using iron: as an ingenious storage system. A depression following the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1764 reduced demand for iron products. Prices fell. Reynolds wanted to keep his furnaces going and his employees at work. Rather than warehouse the excess production, Reynolds used it for rails. Then, if iron prices went back up, he could have the rails removed and sold. Reynolds “tried it at first with great caution,” his granddaughter recalled, “but found it to answer so well, that very soon all their railways were made with iron.”
- nothrabannosir 8y ago
  For mobile users: Richard Reynolds, who managed the Darbys’ Ketley ironworks, near Coalbrookdale, in the 1760s, introduced cast-iron plates and then cast-iron rails to protect the wooden rails from wear and tear or to replace them. He had another reason as well for using iron: as an ingenious storage system. A depression following the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1764 reduced demand for iron products. Prices fell. Reynolds wanted to keep his furnaces going and his employees at work. Rather than warehouse the excess production, Reynolds used it for rails. Then, if iron prices went back up, he could have the rails removed and sold. Reynolds “tried it at first with great caution,” his granddaughter recalled, “but found it to answer so well, that very soon all their railways were made with iron.”
  - Baeocystin 8y ago
    Thank you.
- gliese1337 8y ago
  Huh! I had no idea that timber railways were ever a thing to be replaced with iron in the first place! Neat!
danimal88 8y ago
There are a lot of interesting Demand Response solutions that are also somewhat applicable/useful for this problem. In a normal demand response scenario, when too many people are demanding energy, certain loads are turned off or scaled back (ACs/Thermostats/Water Heaters). Water heaters in particular have been shown to have been one of the better time shifting solutions. Seems like you could do the same thing with both water heaters and AC systems as most buildings have quite large thermal masses. For AC its a bit lame because the hottest time of the day is the best producing for PV frequently so shifting can be tough, but perhaps around the beginning of the day and end of the day there is some opportunity to precool homes before people return and then back off as the price goes above 0, that sort of thing.
gpm 8y ago
Another idea along the same vein is temperature control. Say the comfortable range is 20 to 25 degrees. Normally air conditioning in the summer cools to 25, once electricity becomes free it could turn on and start cooling towards 20, storing that power in the form of cool air. In the winter, buildings with electric heating could do the opposite towards 25. These systems spin up quickly (at least in residential homes) and are a substantial fraction of our energy use.
fungi 8y ago
desal plants cost billions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Desalination_Plant#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Desalination_Plant#C...) and produce toxic byproducts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Environmental https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Environmental)
kkylin 8y ago
I'd also think another challenge is the issue of timescales. "Green" energy sources like wind and solar can have large fluctuations, on the timescale of minutes. I don't know much about desalination plants, but I'd imagine they cannot be started and stopped just like that. (This, incidentally, is a reason I've heard power engineers give for preferring natural gas to e.g. coal, aside from cost considerations: generators are faster to start and stop.)
woodandsteel 8y ago
One problem with this idea is that storage keeps getting cheaper, so a plan like yours that could be a good investment for present storage costs probably wouldn't make sense in a few years, and all that capital investment you hoped would be paid off over ten or twenty years would be lost.
woodandsteel 8y ago
One reason I am very dubious about the various alternatives to batteries that so many people are proposing is that there are lots of very smart people with lots of money behind them who are working on the storage problem, and a good alternative would be worth many tens of billions of dollars. If there was a good alternative, we would be seeing it adopted on a huge scale. My conclusion is the only workable solution is batteries, either lithium-ion or flow.
woodandsteel 8y ago
>I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially From what I understand, they recently have gotten cheap enough that they are starting to be adopted on a large scale. And one advantage they have over many alternatives is they can respond instantly, so they can be used to deal with the momentary shifts in the supply-demand balance that all electric utilities experience on a daily basis. As a result they save a lot more money than just dealing with the daily cycle.
rb808 8y ago
I think there are huge benefits if power was charged at spot rates that were very visible (and actionable). IE its a warm sunny day with lots of wind, the thermostat will let you go down to 74 degrees with AC because power is cheap. If its a warm still evening, let it be warmer in the house to save money. Similarly, run the washer and dryer when its sunny and windy. If power is expensive this week maybe we can't take that weekend trip.
rebuilder 8y ago
It's a problem for infrastructure investors, or more precisely, investors in traditional power plants. Since most traditional power plants tend to produce CO2 and other pollutants, I'm actually inclined to think it's a good thing if economic incentives begin to turn against them. We'll still need power, and energy is big business, so there's tremendous incentive to solve any problems in that sector.
sveme 8y ago
There's a northern German copper plant which can dynamically adjust its energy usage to the availability of renewable energy. If the availability is low, they reduce their production and thereby greatly help the grid. I could imagine plenty of large consumers to dynamically adjust their processes to the price of energy, obviously costs money to setup and maintain, but will be beneficial regardless with very fluctuating energy prices due to the intermittency of renewable energy.
aalleavitch 8y ago
Why don’t we just move all our solar panels 8 hours to the West?
aoner 8y ago
I think sustainable ammonia production would be a good fit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production > Ammonia production depends on plentiful supplies of energy, predominantly natural gas. Due to ammonia's critical role in intensive agriculture and other processes, sustainable production is desirable. This is possible by using renewable energy to generate hydrogen by electrolysis of water. This would be straightforward in a hydrogen economy by diverting some hydrogen production from fuel to feedstock use. For example, in 2002, Iceland produced 2,000 tons of hydrogen gas by electrolysis, using excess electricity production from its hydroelectric plants, primarily for the production of ammonia for fertilizer.
usmeteora 8y ago
I think the issue is, many regions in the U.S. operate on real time energy pricing markets. Generation companies get paid for what they produce based on these energy prices. When prices go below zero, they have to pay to produce. The only groups that can afford to do this, are one's who can use clean energy government subsidies to bid in their cost of production at below zero, and essentially pay to produce energy on the power grid. If you think clean energy should get a preference on the powergrid for dispatching energy, that is fine, and many places in Europe do it well and reliably. However, in this case, real time energy markets are probably not the best reflection of what incentives are truly at play. An example of this is that clean energy gets an unfair advanatage in that it's weaknesses are not exposed. It is good to provide an economic incentive for the generators to need to perform better. An example of this is wind plants in NY. They get energy subsidies for producing power, but not necessarily producing power on the power grid. So they can create energy, and never supply anyone with it, and get subsidies per MW for this. You might think the best way for them to double their income by 1. getting subsidies and 2. actually getting paid back the real time energy price on the power grid would be by supplying power when it's needed by buying batteries and putting that energy they create (when the wind is blowing at night for example, when noones needs it) into the power grid when demand is high, at maybe 5pm on a hot summer day when everyone has their ac cranking, but it turns out that costs money? And they are already getting free money. Some power plants are starting to do that, but they could have easily done that a decade ago. I believe we should have clean energy, and do what it takes to get there, that's why I specialized in Electric Power, but I think the way it's currently set up in the real time markets creates some preverse incentives that hinders optimisation in the field. While clean energy is nice (solar panels, wind turbines) they could use alot of improvement on their efficiency and integrate batteries into their substation design. Many do not because it is too profitable as it is. It's also important to note the people getting paid these subsidies are venture capitol firms funding these clean energy substations. They are not green tree hugging people, and most of the companies have an incredibly diverse portfolio that does not reflect a loyal dedication to clean energy cause. The profits they receive from these government funding go back to VC firms to be reallocated to...well.. whatever they see fit and many times it has very little to do with powergrid stuff at all, much less clean energy. This is free money for venture capitalists...think about that. It's a very interesting market because people's idea of ethics and moral rightness are able to blind some very basic abuses in the system that degrade the performance, reliability and overall amount of clean energy produced on the power grid.
therealdrag0 8y ago
I used to work for Alstom Grid (now GE Grid), and I was kinda abstracted from specific use-cases, but we developed energy markets [0] that I believe are relevant to what you're talking about. Our energy market tools allowed companies to bid for electricity and schedule their work. So if you had an energy hungry rock crusher that can run at any time of day, you could buy or sell energy depending on the supply/demand curves. But apparently not every utility participates in the energy markets. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_transmission_organization_(North_America) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_transmission_organiza...

verisimilitude 8y ago

I believe aluminum is nicknamed "solid electricity" due to the ore purification process or somesuch; which dovetails well with the strategy you outline here!

bluGill 8y ago
Unfortunately it doesn't. Aluminum needs a lot of electricity, but it needs to be consistent for several hours. It takes a lot of energy true, but the furnaces need to be at operating temperature. You can't just turn them on and off, there are startup and cool down times that need to be accounted for.
- docker_up 8y ago
  Current furnaces do. But what if you changed the manufacturing process as well so that maybe the yield isn't as high but it's essentially "for free" in terms of electricity?
  - mercutio2 8y ago
    What you’re proposing is synonymous with “let’s make unobtainium with our spare electricity!” If we could make anodes which weren’t destroyed by falling to a low temperature, we’d already be doing it.
- russdill 8y ago
  You might be able to add a separate process where salt gets melted, stored, and used to heat furnaces.
- rstuart4133 8y ago
  > Aluminum needs a lot of electricity, but it needs to be consistent for several hours. Then Aluminium smelting is an excellent match for wind and solar. Quoting https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00529986/file/paper_Billund_2003.pdf https://hal-mines-paristech.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-0052998... "Typical numbers in accuracy are an RMSE of about 10- 15% of the installed wind power capacity for a 36 hour horizon."
  - jmmcd 8y ago
    If I understand right, that figure is measuring the accuracy of a prediction of electricity production, not the constancy of the production. We can't smelt aluminium with no power even if we have predicted that there'll be no power.
    - rstuart4133 8y ago
      To be honest I don't know, but I do know taking advantage unpredictable power of this sort is why Aluminium plants are built in the first place. Where I live they are paired with coal fired plants. The reason they are paired with coal fired plants is coal can't change it's output fast enough to match the somewhat unpredictable changes in electricity usage. So the coal plant needs someone who will buy power when it's cheap, and not use (much) when its expensive. Apparently an Aluminium smelter fits the bill nicely. I presume it uses enormous of amounts of power to disassociate the Al(OH)3 but needs only a small amount of power to keep the pots at operating temperature which is not particularly surprising as the pots can be thermally insulated. Maybe the above claim that Aluminium can't tolerate rapid changes in available electricity is true, but it sounds odd. Coal fired plants often "trip out" - meaning the generator drops off line without warning. This is an unpredictable change that happens much faster than the sort of unreliability we see from renewables - it's a huge change that happens in milliseconds. And it's not uncommon: https://leadingedgeenergy.com.au/coal-fired-generators-trip/ https://leadingedgeenergy.com.au/coal-fired-generators-trip/ Again, the Aluminium plants seem to cope with this extreme unreliability just fine.
leggomylibro 8y ago
Haha, I like that description a lot. You can even make small batteries out of little more than aluminum, an electrolyte like salt, and (I think) a way to bring oxygen to the cathode like activated charcol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium%E2%80%93air_battery
Gibbon1 8y ago
About ten years ago I read a paper describing a pilot plant in 1950's Norway that was electrowinning iron from sulfide ore. I think the energy usage was 4-5kwh/kg. Roughly the reason it's not economic is electricity nominally costs about 5 times what coal/nat gas does. And with the current carbon footprint of the grid it probably doesn't reduce CO2 emissions. But that could change with as clean grid that has wild daily price swings. Electrowinning iron and other metals could easily soak up excess power.
gene-h 8y ago
There are some aluminum plants in Germany that do this[1] More ambitiously ARPA-E has a program where one of the goals is light metal production(aluminum, magnesium,etc) using variable energy sources[1]. One of the interesting possibilities they present in the program is being able to use molten metal produced in refining as an energy storage medium. Although I couldn't find any program participants doing this one is using thermal energy storage for metal production[2]. A fair amount of metal refining processes need high amounts of heat and heat can be stored easier than electricity at scale. [0]https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/german-firm-turns-aluminum-smelter-into-huge-battery https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/german-firm-tur... [1]https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/documents/files/METALS_ProgramSummary.pdf https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/documents/file... [2]https://arpa-e.energy.gov/?q=slick-sheet-project/high-temperature-thermal-storage-light-metal-production https://arpa-e.energy.gov/?q=slick-sheet-project/high-temper...

mtgx 8y ago

If they can produce so much cheap energy, doesn't that balance out with the more expensive batteries they have to buy? (which will only get cheaper in the years to come)

DoctorOetker 8y ago
there is the crucial difference that batteries wear out, so you have to buy new batteries. storage space for products or bulk matteer does not typically wear out (or not nearly as fast).

jabl 8y ago

Desalination is AFAIK energy AND capital intensive, so it's very expensive having such equipment sitting around doing nothing until energy prices fluctuate low enough. Now, there are situations where demand response makes economic sense; just not enough by far to balance a huge amount of variable renewables.

ethagknight 8y ago

With your desal example, I think a bulk of the energy requirement for desalination is building a pressure differential. That seems like it would be very easy to parallelize.. you don't need full on duplicative Desalination sites, you just need pressure vessels that can store large amounts of compressed air to take advantage of energy gluts.

DoctorOetker 8y ago
I thought they used electricity to deionize salt water, the salts are already dissociated into positive and negative ions, so pass a current through the water, and every now and then raise the electrodes out, mechanically scrape it off or reverse current in dump brine to remove the ions...
- amluto 8y ago
  Doesn’t work. By the time you’ve moved any non-negligible amount of ions, you’ve built up an insane amount of charge and hence voltage. That voltage will be impossible to work with, not to mention many orders of magnitude higher than the voltage needed to split water into H2 and O2. One mole of singly charged ions is ~1e5 Coulombs. At an insanely high capacitance of 1 Farad (which you’ll never see in such an application) that’s 100kV of static charge by the time you move a few grams of salt. This is why you essentially never encounter ions by themselves.
  - mikec3010 8y ago
    Could you store electrical energy this way more efficiently than pumped hydroelectric? Like make a capacitor the size of a wastewater storage tank?
    - logfromblammo 8y ago
      Wouldn't it self-discharge? And at that size, also blow itself up?
    - amluto 8y ago

nostrademons 8y ago

It's likely a short-term problem. There are plenty of ways to fix it (besides the one you mention, just shut down coal & oil power plants for good and replace them with technologies like natural gas or hydro that can easily react to spikes in demand), but all of the fixes require capital investments and time to build factories & tooling. Basically this is a problem because a bunch of existing incumbents are probably going to go bankrupt, or at least have to write down a lot of capital equipment and invest in new technologies. Boo-hoo for the incumbents, but it's good for consumers and good for society.

mac01021 8y ago
Is the responsiveness of an oil plant so different from a natural gas plant? Why? They're both essentially a furnace fueled by a flow of combustible fluid, right?
- mechagodzilla 8y ago
  They are similar, but outside of small islands few people use oil for power generation due to the high cost compared to natural gas.
- chronomex 8y ago
  Natgas is a turbine engine directly; coal and oil uses a boiler running a steam turbine.
- jabl 8y ago
  NG plants tend to use gas turbines, which can ramp very quickly indeed. Steam plants are a lot slower (thermal stresses and whatnot). Very little electricity is produced with oil, BTW. Steam plants are usually coal or nuclear.
  - hectormalot 8y ago
    Note: many bigger gas plants are combined cycle, the exhaust of the gas turbine generates steam in a waste heat boiler for a steam turbine. Often multiple GTs on a single ST.

ragebol 8y ago

I think that usually, stuff like desalination plants aren't over-dimensioned but are built to consume some known amount of power. There's nothing to consume near-free power because that capacity would sit idle the vast majority of time.

filleokus 8y ago

I guess this will maybe emerge in the future if the trend continues and is fairly steady. The problems I see is that the capital cost of many of the most energy demanding processes are such that they only make sense to run almost 24/7, and if the cheap electricity is only available 8/5 (or something) the economics might not work out. Maybe there are some applications out there that are cheap enough for this to be sustainable.

xigma 8y ago

You "currently" have a drought, but otherwise you have plenty of water, so a desalination plant isn't a wise investment (yet). Also keep in mind that these are energy spikes that cause negative prices, whereas most industrial uses need a constant and even supply. These spikes are countered by periods of little to no energy. This is the biggest problem with (most) renewables, they cannot entirely replace coal or nuclear energy for that reason. Energy storage (at cost) is an unsolved problem.

fixermark 8y ago
> Energy storage (at cost) is an unsolved problem. Super-true. It's actually pretty fascinating how it's currently done in the grid; storage of energy is often done by converting it (at significant efficiency loss) to a mechanical format. Those formats can get very creative---traditional is "pump a bunch of water uphill into an artificial reservoir," but in areas where big dry mines are available, capping the mine and pressurizing the air inside is also used, which feels super-weird but apparently works?
- viraptor 8y ago
  I've never heard of this before and it sounds really cool. CAES on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storage https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_energy_storag... UK project: https://www.storelectric.com/technology/ https://www.storelectric.com/technology/
- icebraining 8y ago
  Also, huge flywheels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_storage_power_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_storage_power_system
Spooky23 8y ago
They will slowly eat away at base loads and lower costs. In the meantime, you address marginal demand at a lower cost.
kaybe 8y ago

floatrock 8y ago

Capital costs vs. marginal costs. You're going to build a $100M desalination plant and run it for three hours a day? That's a ton of money sitting idle most of the day, far more than what is recovered with zero operating costs. (This is called the utilization factor -- how long a piece of equipment is used vs. staying idle) Ideally you want useful processes with low capital costs and expensive marginal/energy costs. Desalination is not one of those.

DoctorOetker 8y ago
Yes, depending on the timescale considered, the utilization factor of the plant should be weighed against the utilization factor of flood energy. In the long run it should pay itself back.
- woodpanel 8y ago
  > In the long run it should pay itself back. So in financial terms wouldn't this mean a rather weak profit margin? Plus the relatively high-risk that flood energy might not always result in free or negative energy prices gives it a bleak risk-to-profit ratio. In other words, there would always be something more utilizable to be done with excess energy (e.g. mining bitcoins etc. and buy water with it when you need it). PS: But I like the main point you make, to take in more aspects when calculating efficient renewable energy systems. Not a crypto-investor (or even believer).
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    Right, I explicitly mentioned not really believing desalination to be a good example, I was using it more as a fake illustrative example. In hindsight I should have ended with posing the following question: how do we make a simple guide for factory/etc operators/consultants to recognize such steps in their production line? Desalination is a bad example, because you need a complete new plant, while it is conceivable that other products have one or more energy dense steps. What should such instructions look like? Follow the product through your production line, and at each step measure the energy consumed per part at the step, and the volume per part when efficiently stacked. Also note if the step is automated or needs a human, if it is human, check if it can be automated. If it is automatable, and the energy density for the step is high enough, calculate the cost for changing the production line, allocating sufficient storage, and possibly automating a certain task, and parallellizing the step such that it can be run during energy flood. Then calculate through the price difference how fast it pays itself back. Mention the importance of actually measuring the energy consumption, instead of just reading off a machine specification of wattage, and cycle time. Etc. Edit: The banks that wish to invest in cheapening such a step could train consultants and send them to factories interested in good deals. I.e. any potential profit is shared between company and bank, and the bank takes the risk (hence has the motivation to do the calculation properly, and will have best knowledge through experience of suitable step energy densities)

dalbasal 8y ago

I imagine something like this would happen, if this is a "real" economic phenomenon rather than a quirky price/billing system. I think that it's something like that though, a goof in a not-quite-designed collection of old energy funding/billing setups and newer green energy stuff. Otherwise there'd be someone just consuming electricity for pay. I don't think this is "retail."

rpearl 8y ago
the point is that "just consuming" the electricity is nontrivial. Suppose you've been paid to take some number of megawatt hours of energy. Okay: What do you do with it? At the least useful, you have to safely convert it into heat it without damaging something. More useful would be storing it. If you know how to solve that, yeah, you will make money.
- dalbasal 8y ago
  I don't think it's that difficult, depending on how much power you're talking about. You could literally attempt to boil the ocean, if you want to be ambitious. Heat your pool, for a domestic application.
  - rpearl 8y ago
    Okay, go for it then. Good luck!

thinkcontext 8y ago

If you wait for power prices to be negative (or merely lower than usual) you are not getting an economic return on the money you put into the desalination plant when it is not running. Think about it, if you get a 100M Euros loan to make a desalination plant, how long will it take to pay that off if you only run your plant a few hours per day vs 24 hours per day. Whether it makes economic sense depends on the difference in power prices, the capacity factor, and the ratio to capital cost. Germany has been attempting to make it work by turning the surplus electricity into hydrogen gas (and then maybe to something else, methane, diesel, ammonia, etc) by splitting water.

azeotropic 8y ago
More like 1 hour every 4 days in Germany, if I'm counting the number of hours YTD correctly.
- thinkcontext 8y ago
  Well, I did also say low not just negative.
rapnie 8y ago
Yes, hydrolysis could be a good solution. Create hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen could also be used in hydrogen cars that we have been talking about for decades.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
dwd 8y ago
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-08/hydrogen-fuel-breakthrough-csiro-game-changer-export-potential/10082514?pfmredir=sm http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-08/hydrogen-fuel-breakthr... Ammonia would be preferrable as it is carbon-free and readily liquified.
- 8y ago

TomK32 8y ago

time to spin up some giant flywheels.

istjohn 8y ago

I suspect it would be difficult to find an energy-intensive process with sufficiently low capital costs that it would make sense to only operate--recouping some of the costs--when energy rates are negative.

yayana 8y ago

I think Pumped Hydroelectric Storage is what you are looking for. I've seen a few of them here in Switzerland. I think many were originally built out with the train system's grid for it's reliably scheduled low and high capacity times. http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/pumped-hydroelectric-storage http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/pumped-...

gamegoblin 8y ago
Does Belgium (OPs example) have the geography necessary to support pumped hydro? Your example, Switzerland, is significantly more mountainous than Belgium.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  I know of at least one pumped storage dam in Belgium, in the mountainous southern part (Wallonia)
- yvdriess 8y ago
  Wallonia has at least one pumped hydro that I know of. There were plants for a 'energy island' 300MW hydro plant at sea, near the large-scale wind farms. The idea is the same, pump sea water up an artificial horse-shoe shaped island. A nice bonus is that you can play with the tides as well. The height difference does not have to be great, if you can compensate with a large surface area. As far as I know, those plans were shelved. A quick googling says that similar concepts are being considered for interconnected dutch/danish wind farms.
- markvdb 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coo-Trois-Ponts_Hydroelectric_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coo-Trois-Ponts_Hydroelectric_... It has 1164MW capacity, with ~1000GWh/year supplied.
petre 8y ago
Also flywheel storage. Eg: http://schwungrad-energie.com/schwungrads-success-eu-horizon-2020-programme/ http://schwungrad-energie.com/schwungrads-success-eu-horizon...

weberc2 8y ago

Bitcoin mining. This may or may not be a sincere suggestion.

dgacmu 8y ago
Same flaw as the other ideas - mining is very capital intensive. You can use mining in a demand response capacity, but it's best used when you can run it 98% of the time and shut down during the most expensive 2%. If you look at some of the data from Australia, peak cost per MW can go really high. It's also an environmental travesty, but that's already the case.
- nukemandan 8y ago
  Remember that the alternative at the moments is literally pumping that energy into the ground as waste heat. I think that renewable resources otherwise wasted being used for mining instead of that seems like a win-win.
  - dgacmu 8y ago
    It takes resources - a lot of them, including energy - to build the miners. It's a net loss if you can't run the miners at a sufficient duty cycle. Cheap mining power is about 4c per kwh. A $350 GPU at 200W (hand-waving) takes about 20c/day to operate. At $70/year of power, and maybe a useful life of 3 years, it's actually capital-dominated.
    - nukemandan 8y ago
      True- so if you lived in a zone with negative price, then you would throttle your GPUs otherwise and only go full throttle when you literal get paid to use the power. But duty cycle just for that would be low... I would need to look more at the stats. But if full time operation on average over the year was closer to (or less than) $0 for power usage, could you net a profit over the life cycle? I would surely hope so!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

kaybe 8y ago

To reverse the process we can then run an osmosis power plant and have a way to store energy. I'm sure someone out there already ran the numbers.

matthewmcg 8y ago

Interesting thought. In Richard Rhodes new book Energy, he describes how an early iron smelting works in England, faced with temporarily low demand due to a recession, rolled its excess iron into railroad tracks which could be re-used for other purposes once demand recovered: Richard Reynolds, who managed the Darbys’ Ketley ironworks, near Coalbrookdale, in the 1760s, introduced cast-iron plates and then cast-iron rails to protect the wooden rails from wear and tear or to replace them. He had another reason as well for using iron: as an ingenious storage system. A depression following the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1764 reduced demand for iron products. Prices fell. Reynolds wanted to keep his furnaces going and his employees at work. Rather than warehouse the excess production, Reynolds used it for rails. Then, if iron prices went back up, he could have the rails removed and sold. Reynolds “tried it at first with great caution,” his granddaughter recalled, “but found it to answer so well, that very soon all their railways were made with iron.”

nothrabannosir 8y ago
For mobile users: Richard Reynolds, who managed the Darbys’ Ketley ironworks, near Coalbrookdale, in the 1760s, introduced cast-iron plates and then cast-iron rails to protect the wooden rails from wear and tear or to replace them. He had another reason as well for using iron: as an ingenious storage system. A depression following the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1764 reduced demand for iron products. Prices fell. Reynolds wanted to keep his furnaces going and his employees at work. Rather than warehouse the excess production, Reynolds used it for rails. Then, if iron prices went back up, he could have the rails removed and sold. Reynolds “tried it at first with great caution,” his granddaughter recalled, “but found it to answer so well, that very soon all their railways were made with iron.”
- Baeocystin 8y ago
  Thank you.
gliese1337 8y ago
Huh! I had no idea that timber railways were ever a thing to be replaced with iron in the first place! Neat!

danimal88 8y ago

There are a lot of interesting Demand Response solutions that are also somewhat applicable/useful for this problem. In a normal demand response scenario, when too many people are demanding energy, certain loads are turned off or scaled back (ACs/Thermostats/Water Heaters). Water heaters in particular have been shown to have been one of the better time shifting solutions. Seems like you could do the same thing with both water heaters and AC systems as most buildings have quite large thermal masses. For AC its a bit lame because the hottest time of the day is the best producing for PV frequently so shifting can be tough, but perhaps around the beginning of the day and end of the day there is some opportunity to precool homes before people return and then back off as the price goes above 0, that sort of thing.

gpm 8y ago

Another idea along the same vein is temperature control. Say the comfortable range is 20 to 25 degrees. Normally air conditioning in the summer cools to 25, once electricity becomes free it could turn on and start cooling towards 20, storing that power in the form of cool air. In the winter, buildings with electric heating could do the opposite towards 25. These systems spin up quickly (at least in residential homes) and are a substantial fraction of our energy use.

fungi 8y ago

desal plants cost billions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Desalination_Plant#Cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Desalination_Plant#C...) and produce toxic byproducts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Environmental https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Environmental)

kkylin 8y ago

I'd also think another challenge is the issue of timescales. "Green" energy sources like wind and solar can have large fluctuations, on the timescale of minutes. I don't know much about desalination plants, but I'd imagine they cannot be started and stopped just like that. (This, incidentally, is a reason I've heard power engineers give for preferring natural gas to e.g. coal, aside from cost considerations: generators are faster to start and stop.)

woodandsteel 8y ago

One problem with this idea is that storage keeps getting cheaper, so a plan like yours that could be a good investment for present storage costs probably wouldn't make sense in a few years, and all that capital investment you hoped would be paid off over ten or twenty years would be lost.

woodandsteel 8y ago

One reason I am very dubious about the various alternatives to batteries that so many people are proposing is that there are lots of very smart people with lots of money behind them who are working on the storage problem, and a good alternative would be worth many tens of billions of dollars. If there was a good alternative, we would be seeing it adopted on a huge scale. My conclusion is the only workable solution is batteries, either lithium-ion or flow.

woodandsteel 8y ago

>I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially From what I understand, they recently have gotten cheap enough that they are starting to be adopted on a large scale. And one advantage they have over many alternatives is they can respond instantly, so they can be used to deal with the momentary shifts in the supply-demand balance that all electric utilities experience on a daily basis. As a result they save a lot more money than just dealing with the daily cycle.

rb808 8y ago

I think there are huge benefits if power was charged at spot rates that were very visible (and actionable). IE its a warm sunny day with lots of wind, the thermostat will let you go down to 74 degrees with AC because power is cheap. If its a warm still evening, let it be warmer in the house to save money. Similarly, run the washer and dryer when its sunny and windy. If power is expensive this week maybe we can't take that weekend trip.

rebuilder 8y ago

It's a problem for infrastructure investors, or more precisely, investors in traditional power plants. Since most traditional power plants tend to produce CO2 and other pollutants, I'm actually inclined to think it's a good thing if economic incentives begin to turn against them. We'll still need power, and energy is big business, so there's tremendous incentive to solve any problems in that sector.

sveme 8y ago

There's a northern German copper plant which can dynamically adjust its energy usage to the availability of renewable energy. If the availability is low, they reduce their production and thereby greatly help the grid. I could imagine plenty of large consumers to dynamically adjust their processes to the price of energy, obviously costs money to setup and maintain, but will be beneficial regardless with very fluctuating energy prices due to the intermittency of renewable energy.

aalleavitch 8y ago

Why don’t we just move all our solar panels 8 hours to the West?

aoner 8y ago

I think sustainable ammonia production would be a good fit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonia_production > Ammonia production depends on plentiful supplies of energy, predominantly natural gas. Due to ammonia's critical role in intensive agriculture and other processes, sustainable production is desirable. This is possible by using renewable energy to generate hydrogen by electrolysis of water. This would be straightforward in a hydrogen economy by diverting some hydrogen production from fuel to feedstock use. For example, in 2002, Iceland produced 2,000 tons of hydrogen gas by electrolysis, using excess electricity production from its hydroelectric plants, primarily for the production of ammonia for fertilizer.

usmeteora 8y ago

I think the issue is, many regions in the U.S. operate on real time energy pricing markets. Generation companies get paid for what they produce based on these energy prices. When prices go below zero, they have to pay to produce. The only groups that can afford to do this, are one's who can use clean energy government subsidies to bid in their cost of production at below zero, and essentially pay to produce energy on the power grid. If you think clean energy should get a preference on the powergrid for dispatching energy, that is fine, and many places in Europe do it well and reliably. However, in this case, real time energy markets are probably not the best reflection of what incentives are truly at play. An example of this is that clean energy gets an unfair advanatage in that it's weaknesses are not exposed. It is good to provide an economic incentive for the generators to need to perform better. An example of this is wind plants in NY. They get energy subsidies for producing power, but not necessarily producing power on the power grid. So they can create energy, and never supply anyone with it, and get subsidies per MW for this. You might think the best way for them to double their income by 1. getting subsidies and 2. actually getting paid back the real time energy price on the power grid would be by supplying power when it's needed by buying batteries and putting that energy they create (when the wind is blowing at night for example, when noones needs it) into the power grid when demand is high, at maybe 5pm on a hot summer day when everyone has their ac cranking, but it turns out that costs money? And they are already getting free money. Some power plants are starting to do that, but they could have easily done that a decade ago. I believe we should have clean energy, and do what it takes to get there, that's why I specialized in Electric Power, but I think the way it's currently set up in the real time markets creates some preverse incentives that hinders optimisation in the field. While clean energy is nice (solar panels, wind turbines) they could use alot of improvement on their efficiency and integrate batteries into their substation design. Many do not because it is too profitable as it is. It's also important to note the people getting paid these subsidies are venture capitol firms funding these clean energy substations. They are not green tree hugging people, and most of the companies have an incredibly diverse portfolio that does not reflect a loyal dedication to clean energy cause. The profits they receive from these government funding go back to VC firms to be reallocated to...well.. whatever they see fit and many times it has very little to do with powergrid stuff at all, much less clean energy. This is free money for venture capitalists...think about that. It's a very interesting market because people's idea of ethics and moral rightness are able to blind some very basic abuses in the system that degrade the performance, reliability and overall amount of clean energy produced on the power grid.

therealdrag0 8y ago

I used to work for Alstom Grid (now GE Grid), and I was kinda abstracted from specific use-cases, but we developed energy markets [0] that I believe are relevant to what you're talking about. Our energy market tools allowed companies to bid for electricity and schedule their work. So if you had an energy hungry rock crusher that can run at any time of day, you could buy or sell energy depending on the supply/demand curves. But apparently not every utility participates in the energy markets. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_transmission_organization_(North_America) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_transmission_organiza...