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The solution is actually what's called a "dummy load". Get paid to waste energy and heat up the planet a tiny bit more, gotta love it.
by 4gotunameagain 1y ago
The solution is actually what's called a "dummy load". Get paid to waste energy and heat up the planet a tiny bit more, gotta love it.
- thebruce87m 1y agoCan’t we power a big laser and point it at space or something instead? Anyone got a dumber idea?
- beAbU 1y agoThere are so many things that are energy intensive and not really economically viable: co2 capture, crypto mining, "green" hydrogen, we could see a world soon where a large scale BESS would have an on-site dummy load that does something useful with that electricity
- Analemma_ 1y agoThe problem with all those things is that they are ridiculously capital intensive to set up, and then they sit idle 80% of the time Worse, the whole point of negative electricity prices is that they're an inefficiency in the market which ideally will eventually be optimized away. Then what do you do with your billion-dollar plant that can only run with negative prices that no longer exist?
- adgjlsfhk1 1y agoYou're assuming the way they get optimized away isn't by these sorts of plants.
- karmakurtisaani 1y agoI guess the problem with building a pure energy waster is that it could only operate every now and then, and it's not guaranteed to see negative prices in a few years from now. So, might not be all that profitable.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoUse the electricity to heat up a lump of iron to a very high temperature, than use electromagnets to fling it into space?
- yetihehe 1y agoIf you heat up iron to very high temperature (>770°C), it's much harder to fling it using electromagnets.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoAh that's annoying. Fine, we use the electricity to heat...uh...molten salt encased in stone, and to pull back a very big heat-proof slingshot, and after a threshold it lets go and launches it into space.
- msgodel 1y agoObviously the complaint is about the changing atmospheric absorption properties as a side effect of the generation side, not the heat from using the power. Either way I think people are overthinking it though.
- noitpmeder 1y agoIsn't this the basic description of what a gravity battery should provide?
- horsawlarway 1y agoNo, because his situation is basically that the gravity battery is already sitting at its max height. He's just trying to burn energy because a negative rate means he's getting paid to use it. So sure - it's great to give that energy a functional use first (ex - charge his batteries) but eventually he runs out of functional ways to use the energy but could still be making money by using it. Enter the desire for a dummy load.
- rtkwe 1y agoPumped hydro could do that if they had a way to bypass (either physically or electrically) their turbines on the downhill portion of the loop. Just pump water up and back down without extracting the energy. Then you have a dummy load that isn't just a power sink and is already designed to handle the relatively rapid switches on and off.
- horsawlarway 1y agoYeah, but dummy loads are cheap. Probably cheaper than changing any designs in other places. It's straight forward to add a giant resistive load that just converts electricity back to heat. I can get 10kw heaters for just a couple hundred bucks or 1.5kw heaters for literally $20 usd. And that also switches on/off easily. For hydro... just boiling water with a heater is going to be pretty much unbeatable if we're playing the "waste energy" game. No need to approximate it slowly with your pump motor and risk other infrastructure.
- rtkwe 1y agoThe idea was to have dual use so that they're not obsoleted when we get around to installing sufficient power storage for renewables and also a less heat intensive way to do it too.
- fer 1y ago>"dummy load" You mean crypto miner.
- michaelt 1y agoSurprisingly, not always. If I buy a device for $100 that, given free electricity, will mine $500 of cryptocurrency in its useful life - I can easily lose money if I run it less than 20% of the time. And I doubt electricity is negative priced >20% of the time.
- bee_rider 1y agoYeah, there are a ton of plans in this thread for what to do with excess energy. The problem is, that’s the wrong question. The goal is to answer the question “what should we do with excess energy where we don’t mind building the capacity, but then only rarely running it.” Rather than coming up with some grand scheme, maybe it would be good if our dishwashers and washing machines could listen to the grid and activate when power cost was negative. (We may need to coordinate a bit though, so we don’t all activate at once).
- rtkwe 1y agoIn some areas negative prices account for up to 25% of hours so it's a decent number but still a rough number of spins up and down and a lowish duty cycle. A solution might be to build battery capacity along side these loads to effectively buffer the negative cost power to be able to run continuously. That would skyrocket the initial capital investment though.
- bee_rider 1y agoYeah, batteries are just the sort of expensive/straightforward solution. If you think of it, a dryer is sort of a combination of a flywheel and a heating element, so it should be the over-provisioner’s best friend. IMO a real failure has been not taking advantage of our appliances.
- wcoenen 1y agoPresumably the negatively priced energy came from solar panels, so those sun rays were going to heat the planet anyway. The same still happens with a dummy load, just with extra steps in between to convert to and from electricity. With enough solar panels deployed, you could still argue that they change the albedo of the Earth and therefore it's temperature.
- 4gotunameagain 1y agoNot necessarily. There's also reflection involved. Now to figure out how much exactly you need to take into account the solar panel absorption spectrum & the albedo of the earth.
- eisa01 1y agoRelated, do Solar PV panels need any extra equipment to curtail instead of feeding into the grid? Aside from software integration to remotely control household PV systems, is there anything else needed to curtail during negative price events?
- nick3443 1y agoIf the inverter is smart enough, nothing else would be necessary
- eisa01 1y agoThanks! Google managed to find more details on Reddit when I searched now https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/1iu2kkz/solar_curtailment_where_in_the_system_does_it/ https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/1iu2kkz/solar_curta...
- triceratops 1y agoCould we use it for some kind of carbon capture process?
- Leherenn 1y agoI think it's pretty clear with the constantly increasing durations of negative prices, so far we haven't found a way to do so profitably. Carbon capture or anything else for that matter. Anything that would really love free energy also cost a lot to build and maintain/operate besides electricity. So much that a few hundred hours of free (or even better than free) energy a year is far from enough when you need >90% uptime to make sense. Maybe it makes you go from 95 to 85%, but still clearly it's far more than there are sunshine hours.
- grues-dinner 1y agoIt's basically the idea behind things like hydrogen electroysis with excess energy. The problem is that things that can use bulk energy productively like electrolysers, hydrocarbon crackers, smelters, AI training farms, etc. are very expensive and having them on warm standby but idle most of the time waiting for good grid weather makes for bad returns on the capital expenditure and operational costs.
- Workaccount2 1y agoI know this is grossly pedantic, but not matter what that electricity is used for, it will end up "heating up the planet a bit more". Energy is a waterfall whose base is heat.
- pomerange 1y agoTechnically if you power a laser shooting into space with solar panels you are cooling the planet, but you are ofcourse right in practice and on the scale of the universe!
- stavros 1y agoThat sounds like a good way to waste tons of energy during negative electricity prices to me! Shoot it into space.
- _Algernon_ 1y agoFossil fuels contain energy that are not in the form of heat, so electricity from fossil fuels would heat the planet even ignoring greenhouse effect. If from renewables, however, the energy has been previously extracted from the environment, thus being neutral in terms of heating the planet. Not that it matters, because the effect would be miniscule in any case.
- TGower 1y agoI did some napkin math and the amount of energy used from burning buried coal and oil since the industrial revolution began would warm the atmosphere about 3 degrees C. The assumption that all of the energy would be dumped into the atmosphere and stay there is obviously deeply flawed, but the overall effect might not be miniscule.