4 ms·

On a tangent, is there a way to “dump” excess electricity (other than cutting off production). Like passing it into the ground or something.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
No. There always needs to be a load to balance out the power generation on the grid. Ideally, when there is excess generation, load (that is, work) can be added in some form of battery for later useful discharge, like: charging a battery, pumping water up a hill, spinning flywheels faster, etc. In one interesting example, some large industrial users that operate big freezers will take the freezer temp much lower when there is excess generation (i.e. the freezer needs to be below 0F, but it will go way below that when energy is cheap).
wcoenen 3y ago
Basically you need a big resistor with sufficient cooling. Dissipating megawatts of power is done routinely this way, during load testing of big generators. But I imagine it becomes more of an engineering problem at grid scale, where you might need to dump hundreds of megawatts to make a difference. Cooling starts to require more significant infrastructure and/or environmental impact. E.g. the gigawatts of thermal waste of a nuclear power plants either heats a local river or needs to be dumped in the atmosphere with those big hyperboloid cooling towers.
Kon5ole 3y ago
You could generate hydrogen. Install a few hundred MW's worth of hydrolyzers around the continent and direct all excess there. If there is no excess, they simply don't produce. I feel that this basically has to happen sooner or later when the political obstacles to producing your own energy are removed. Electricity in several regions fluctuates between negative to 30-40 cents per kwh, having a storage mechanism like this to extract the differences as profit has to be a money-fountain, and it's not even expensive or difficult to build.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

No. There always needs to be a load to balance out the power generation on the grid. Ideally, when there is excess generation, load (that is, work) can be added in some form of battery for later useful discharge, like: charging a battery, pumping water up a hill, spinning flywheels faster, etc. In one interesting example, some large industrial users that operate big freezers will take the freezer temp much lower when there is excess generation (i.e. the freezer needs to be below 0F, but it will go way below that when energy is cheap).

wcoenen 3y ago

Basically you need a big resistor with sufficient cooling. Dissipating megawatts of power is done routinely this way, during load testing of big generators. But I imagine it becomes more of an engineering problem at grid scale, where you might need to dump hundreds of megawatts to make a difference. Cooling starts to require more significant infrastructure and/or environmental impact. E.g. the gigawatts of thermal waste of a nuclear power plants either heats a local river or needs to be dumped in the atmosphere with those big hyperboloid cooling towers.

Kon5ole 3y ago

You could generate hydrogen. Install a few hundred MW's worth of hydrolyzers around the continent and direct all excess there. If there is no excess, they simply don't produce. I feel that this basically has to happen sooner or later when the political obstacles to producing your own energy are removed. Electricity in several regions fluctuates between negative to 30-40 cents per kwh, having a storage mechanism like this to extract the differences as profit has to be a money-fountain, and it's not even expensive or difficult to build.