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Well in times of negative energy prices wouldn't it even be good if the air conditioning ran at full capacity?
by doener 1y ago
Well in times of negative energy prices wouldn't it even be good if the air conditioning ran at full capacity?
- Energiekomin 1y agoIn summer? If its not getting to cold for you. In winter yes also if its not getting to warm for you, but also heating water is easy enough. But you don't need that much hot water Potentially also cooling down your fridge more and your freezer. But that is not that much energy. While that works, it would still be quite a waste. It would be a lot better to save it and discarge it later
- WJW 1y agoDepending on how powerful your air conditioner is, it would rapidly start cooling down the building to a temperature which is too low to still be comfortable. You could maybe buffer this with more thermal mass, but then you are back in the game of storing energy and might as well just get extra batteries.
- sib 1y agoWhy not place the air conditioner next to a large electric space heater?
- amluto 1y agoMany heat pumps already have a mechanism for deliberately wasting energy for defrosting the coils. I bet that the same hardware with a different control algorithm could be convinced to heat out the outdoors without much net change in indoor temperature. (The solution involving the smallest amount of extra hardware is to run the system in reverse periodically. There are other solutions.) Whether the negative energy price is enough to balance wear on the system and potential noise is a different question.
- KeplerBoy 1y agoYes, it's not much of an issue if you have free energy.
- lazide 1y agoIt only makes sense if you have ‘more than free’ energy you need to get rid of, because not getting rid of it causes problems. Similar to flaring natural gas, but for actual electricity. This is not a common occurrence or situation, or shouldn’t be anyway, or someone is screwing up pretty badly somewhere.
- AndrewDucker 1y agoWith variable sources of electricity it can be cheaper to have capacity at a level that you sometimes overproduce than to have a capacity that produces at a lower level, and so mostly needs a backup source of power.
- infecto 1y agoIt’s actually quite common. You have base load generation stations and your highly variable solar and wind. There are often times when the power at a wholesale rate dips below zero. It’s too costly to turn off your base load plants and maybe both solar and wind are generating above normal.
- lazide 1y agoSolar inverters can just not draw the solar current, and wind can generally just change the pitch on their rotors at the individual level. The only ones that generally can not help ‘over produce’ are baseload power stations as they have actual physical inertia in very large turbines and can’t respond as quickly to demand.
- infecto 1y agoRight but keep in mind these events are generally short lived and depending on the market there may be reliability guarantees that keep these open or specific federal funding rates. But like I said before when rates go negative you will typically see it in occurrences where you have abnormal conditions (wind and solar generating at the same time) or aggressive night winds. And it does not happen long enough to need to curtail generation.