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).
I have an electricity contract with dynamic pricing that changes every hour based on the day-ahead electricity market for Belgium. I know what the prices for the next day will be around 13h10. I charge the car whenever the prices are lowest: around noon in the sunny months, at night during winter, preferably weekends. I save around 25% of my electricity bill like this. (More in summer, less in winter.)
So it's already possible to incentivize people correctly with price signals, at least in some regions of the world. But people are not yet familiar with this. I guess that will change as the pricing between dynamic and traditional contracts keeps diverging. With a traditional contract, you are essentially paying the average evening peak price all the time. With a dynamic contract, you get access to the cheaper and even negative rates.
In 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.
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).
I have an electricity contract with dynamic pricing that changes every hour based on the day-ahead electricity market for Belgium. I know what the prices for the next day will be around 13h10. I charge the car whenever the prices are lowest: around noon in the sunny months, at night during winter, preferably weekends. I save around 25% of my electricity bill like this. (More in summer, less in winter.)
So it's already possible to incentivize people correctly with price signals, at least in some regions of the world. But people are not yet familiar with this. I guess that will change as the pricing between dynamic and traditional contracts keeps diverging. With a traditional contract, you are essentially paying the average evening peak price all the time. With a dynamic contract, you get access to the cheaper and even negative rates.
In 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.
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