3 ms·
It's like, surely you can "scale down" an electric smelter. Only that would mean almost rebuilding the furnaces afterwards. And it's sort of "simple" for the i
by lstodd 5y ago
It's like, surely you can "scale down" an electric smelter.
Only that would mean almost rebuilding the furnaces afterwards.
And it's sort of "simple" for the iron smelters.
Try to shut down an aluminium smelter at an hour's notice.
I'm not sure if it wouldn't be cheaper to build a completely new facility afterwards.
- ZeroGravitas 5y agoMany such smelters already act as grid connected batteries. Since they store heat, they can vary their electrical loads and get paid for doing so. Pretty much anything that heats, cools or pumps water can do this, but the big users are the easy place to start. There's even startups trying to melt aluminum purely to use it as a storage medium: https://www.alcircle.com/news/azelio-recycled-aluminium-to-store-solar-energy-batteries-unwanted-57070 https://www.alcircle.com/news/azelio-recycled-aluminium-to-s...
- lstodd 5y agoEh. I'm talking about primary smelters, the ones that take bauxite as input. You just can't. It'll ruin the chemical composition, the electolysers, you'll have to throw out (somehow, very expensive in itself) a lot of fluoride in various nasty forms, electrolyzer lining, electrodes, etc. This would cause weeks of delays and $ tens of millions lost. It just can't be done. And it's never done unless a hydroelectric dam fails or something of that magnitude. alcircle.com is just barely less insane. but just barely. Even NaK eutectic makes more sense.
- tmikaeld 5y agoI've seen similar by Salt-X, they use molten salt. Glad science is being done on this, but it seems hard, the salt causes korrosion issues, so it doesn't last long.