Comment by horsawlarway
3 days ago
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.
Yeah, 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.
The 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.
Giant resistors cooled with fans are cheaper and easier to maintain than pipes and pumps.
Yes of course. My idea was a way for existing facilities to also function in this capacity so you didn't wind up with facilities reliant only on negative prices. I think that's important because those prices are a bandaid on the real problem that would be solved by sufficient power storage.
You can build this at a small scale pretty cheaply but the connection to sink meaningful amounts of power would quickly become a significant part of the expense.
That is what (diesel powered) locomotives do to get rid of electrical power created by using the wheel motors for braking.
New designs store the power in batteries, but most locomotives used in the US still have a compartment filled with fans and resistors instead.