Comment by 4gotunameagain
2 days 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.
2 days 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.
I 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.
Fossil 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.
I 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.
Technically 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!
That sounds like a good way to waste tons of energy during negative electricity prices to me! Shoot it into space.
Can’t we power a big laser and point it at space or something instead? Anyone got a dumber idea?
There 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
The 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?
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I 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.
Obviously 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.
Use the electricity to heat up a lump of iron to a very high temperature, than use electromagnets to fling it into space?
If you heat up iron to very high temperature (>770°C), it's much harder to fling it using electromagnets.
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Presumably 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.
Related, 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?
If the inverter is smart enough, nothing else would be necessary
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Not 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.
>"dummy load"
You mean crypto miner.
Surprisingly, 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.
Yeah, 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).
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Could we use it for some kind of carbon capture process?
I 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.
It'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.
Isn't this the basic description of what a gravity battery should provide?
No, 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.
Pumped 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.
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