4 ms·

If we expect industry to take up the excess, than either 1. that industry will only operate according to the weather or 2. We'll still need some variable power

by jonfw 4y ago

If we expect industry to take up the excess, than either 1. that industry will only operate according to the weather or 2. We'll still need some variable power generation that can be switched on when wind or solar isn't producing enough

Symbiote 4y ago
A few industrial users can weather changes in supply, with notice of the expected price in advance. The aluminium smelter can heat to x+250°, let things cool to x° while people cook their evening meal, then heat up again afterwards. A large supermarket chain can set their refrigerators to 5°, but by allowing the range to move between 3° and 7° can save significant power. (One of the big British supermarkets already does this.)
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  You don’t really get any more Solar after dinner. If everyone gets a big battery (expensive) then they could slowly offload the charge overnight but that would need to make financial sense to the house owners somehow. At a minimum you’d need to recuperate the wear on the battery as they all have a finite amount of cycles
- makomk 4y ago
  That only works on short timescales, which isn't the main problem because there are so many ways of solving that (for example batteries or thermal storage for home heating).
  - bluGill 4y ago
    If they have notice the smelter will be happy to shutdown for maintenance for a few months. You need to plan this with them a year in advance though.
    - jonfw 4y ago
      Seasonal operation is not desirable and has lots and lots of side effects. As an example, a smelter that operates half the year takes twice as much capital to produce the same throughput as one that operates year round. That’s before we get into all of the reasons that seasonal labor is undesirable, or how much additional warehouse capacity would be required to stockpile the metal which will needed over the unoperational months, or the raw material being stockpiled while it’s unable to be processed, or the impact on just in time supply chains, etc.
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    The large, industrial users are an example of thermal storage, but at a different scale than home heating. Tesco's fridges are apparently worth about 25-50MW, so like a small grid-scale battery: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/23/cool-running-supermarket-fridges-could-help-power-uk https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/23/cool-runnin... An aluminium smelter is gigawatts, the one in Scotland is 1.2GW, which is a medium-size power plant by itself. They're easy projects, compared to installing thousands or hundreds of thousands of batteries or new heating systems in homes.

by jonfw 4y ago

Symbiote 4y ago

A few industrial users can weather changes in supply, with notice of the expected price in advance. The aluminium smelter can heat to x+250°, let things cool to x° while people cook their evening meal, then heat up again afterwards. A large supermarket chain can set their refrigerators to 5°, but by allowing the range to move between 3° and 7° can save significant power. (One of the big British supermarkets already does this.)

coffeebeqn 4y ago
You don’t really get any more Solar after dinner. If everyone gets a big battery (expensive) then they could slowly offload the charge overnight but that would need to make financial sense to the house owners somehow. At a minimum you’d need to recuperate the wear on the battery as they all have a finite amount of cycles
makomk 4y ago
That only works on short timescales, which isn't the main problem because there are so many ways of solving that (for example batteries or thermal storage for home heating).
- bluGill 4y ago
  If they have notice the smelter will be happy to shutdown for maintenance for a few months. You need to plan this with them a year in advance though.
  - jonfw 4y ago
    Seasonal operation is not desirable and has lots and lots of side effects. As an example, a smelter that operates half the year takes twice as much capital to produce the same throughput as one that operates year round. That’s before we get into all of the reasons that seasonal labor is undesirable, or how much additional warehouse capacity would be required to stockpile the metal which will needed over the unoperational months, or the raw material being stockpiled while it’s unable to be processed, or the impact on just in time supply chains, etc.
- Symbiote 4y ago
  The large, industrial users are an example of thermal storage, but at a different scale than home heating. Tesco's fridges are apparently worth about 25-50MW, so like a small grid-scale battery: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/23/cool-running-supermarket-fridges-could-help-power-uk https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/23/cool-runnin... An aluminium smelter is gigawatts, the one in Scotland is 1.2GW, which is a medium-size power plant by itself. They're easy projects, compared to installing thousands or hundreds of thousands of batteries or new heating systems in homes.