3 ms·

So what you're saying is that there is no free/cheap way to waste/get rid of energy? If there were, surely the energy companies would do that instead of paying

• cmrx64 3y ago
  Ultimately you turn it back to heat, but then you need to put the heat somewhere. One possibility is to just dump it into the earth via a grounding system. You don’t really want to be doing that except in emergency: the soil resistivity isn’t well controlled and in general it’s an extremely crude method. This is the boundary of my ignorance, though: I don’t know what the actual equilibrium system dynamics are. But I believe that using the market to induce demand is ~always going to be more (globally) efficient than curtailing generation or providing grid-scale radiators: the economy has almost certainly got a more productive use for marginally cheaper power than simply returning it to heat. In this margin, only the transmission costs matter.