Comment by bee_rider
2 days ago
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.
2 days ago
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.
But it is not horrible. A lot of people have resistive water heating for their solar setup because grid sell prices are super low and a 2kw water heater cost basically nothing.
1 reply →
> Electric heating elements aren't free nor infinite in capacity.
They are about as close to an ideal load as one could imagine.
And capacity is easily expanded with a water tower. You can scale the total thermal energy stored and the efficiency of that storage by simply building a very large water tower. You don't even need special insulation because the water insulates itself.
> You'd pay a lot of money for a rarely used asset
Assuming you've converted over to district heating and cooling, it'd be frequently used as climate control for surrounding buildings.
> that has to be replaced by something else most of the time
What? No. District heating is the most efficient way to provide climate control, bar none. The only thing that needs to happen is setting minimum and maximum temps. Maintain the minimum temp and when negative power price events hit heat to the maximum or cool to the minimum.
And if you want to get super clever, part of your storage can be sand which can store huge amounts of energy.
> because people want their heating to be reliable.
District heating/cooling is as reliable as plumbing. That's because that's effectively all that it is. It's super reliable. If the incoming water is 60C or 90C, it doesn't make too much of a difference in terms of heating a home.
It's a proven tech. Many universities use it because it significantly reduces the heating and cooling cost for their buildings. My own city uses district heating in the downtown to great effect.
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.