The big problem there is you have these intensely capital expensive capture plants sitting idle around 75% of the time. Also the processes may not gracefully start and stop though maybe you could smooth that out by building a huge battery bank along with the CC plant to effectively run a full duty cycle with 'free' energy. That bumps the capital costs up again though so the economics get tricky.
Yeah. Anything that's designed to use nearly-free or negative-priced energy from the grid needs to be cheap to build and easy to start and stop (The former being one of the main issues with the 'bitcoin mining as grid management' idea).
In theory if you run it using negative priced energy you could maybe run with older less efficient hardware that's not viable for current mining that would be much cheaper, if you can source it. I'm thinking older ASICs for BTC for example where the best in class kHash/W has moved on and the price doesn't support running the older devices but the negative price would offset that by giving a reliable return on time to offset the extra energy burned.
It'd take a far amount of math to figure out if that tips it over though I don't feel like tackling haha.
Electric heating elements aren't free nor infinite in capacity. You'd pay a lot of money for a rarely used asset that has to be replaced by something else most of the time because people want their heating to be reliable.
The problem is desalination plants cost billions. You're not going to make money building one then running it the 1% of the time the price of electricity is negative.
The big problem there is you have these intensely capital expensive capture plants sitting idle around 75% of the time. Also the processes may not gracefully start and stop though maybe you could smooth that out by building a huge battery bank along with the CC plant to effectively run a full duty cycle with 'free' energy. That bumps the capital costs up again though so the economics get tricky.
Yeah. Anything that's designed to use nearly-free or negative-priced energy from the grid needs to be cheap to build and easy to start and stop (The former being one of the main issues with the 'bitcoin mining as grid management' idea).
In theory if you run it using negative priced energy you could maybe run with older less efficient hardware that's not viable for current mining that would be much cheaper, if you can source it. I'm thinking older ASICs for BTC for example where the best in class kHash/W has moved on and the price doesn't support running the older devices but the negative price would offset that by giving a reliable return on time to offset the extra energy burned.
It'd take a far amount of math to figure out if that tips it over though I don't feel like tackling haha.
The real low hanging fruit is energy use you were going to do earlier/later anyway but where timing isn't important.
Heating water, cooling water, pumping water, charging batteries, running power hungry machines.
It's half century old tech and usually the only thing missing is a financial incentive to do so.
I wonder if desalination would be another good use. But, yeah, it is probably just a matter of how fast the processes can absorb extra power.
District heating and cooling would be an excellent sink for the power.
Water needs a lot of energy to cool or heat, concentrated at a district, you could easily absorb a lot of energy at negative prices.
Electric heating elements aren't free nor infinite in capacity. You'd pay a lot of money for a rarely used asset that has to be replaced by something else most of the time because people want their heating to be reliable.
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The problem is desalination plants cost billions. You're not going to make money building one then running it the 1% of the time the price of electricity is negative.