Comment by doener
2 days ago
Well in times of negative energy prices wouldn't it even be good if the air conditioning ran at full capacity?
2 days ago
Well in times of negative energy prices wouldn't it even be good if the air conditioning ran at full capacity?
Depending 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.
Many 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.
Why not place the air conditioner next to a large electric space heater?
In 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
Yes, it's not much of an issue if you have free energy.
It 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.
Electricity prices around here (Austria) are negative around noon on most summer days. They pay you to waste all that solar energy people are feeding into the grid.
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Is it really screwing up? If solar panels are cheaper than batteries, then you can over-provision the solar panels and then you won’t need to use the batteries as much, so you can probably get away with smaller installations.
My gut would expect it to approach $0 if full communication were possible, based on the instinct that most people would run their dishwashers if the energy cost was $0.
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It’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.
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With 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.