3 ms·
The trouble is that the factory costs something too. If you're only running half the time, now you need to spend twice as much on factory to make the same amoun
by DennisP 6y ago
The trouble is that the factory costs something too. If you're only running half the time, now you need to spend twice as much on factory to make the same amount of stuff each month.
So if we build a wind/solar grid without enough storage, this sort of demand management isn't a free lunch. It's just that instead of the power company paying the cost of intermittency, it'd be externalizing that cost to everybody else, who pay in higher capital costs.
(For aluminum in particular you have another problem: if you shut down more than about six hours, the molten aluminum freezes and you spend a lot of money on repairs.)
- heavenlyblue 6y agoYou could have a car charger that is remotely controlled by the power companies and can be disabled to shed/elevate electricity consumption in the country.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoTesla already supports this in some Scandinavian countries, where vehicles are controlled as distributed aggregate load. It’s no different than Google getting paid when utilities send a signal to Nest saying, “power is going to be expensive shortly, precool everyone’s home in this geobound and then raise the temp so we don’t have to start gas peakers up.”