Comment by rtkwe

3 days ago

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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rtkwe

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bee_rider  3 days ago

Yeah, batteries are just the sort of expensive/straightforward solution.

If you think of it, a dryer is sort of a combination of a flywheel and a heating element, so it should be the over-provisioner’s best friend. IMO a real failure has been not taking advantage of our appliances.

  • rtkwe  3 days ago

    The issue there is connectivity and most residential customers don't pay spot prices so you need to upgrade their meters as well or build metering into the appliance so they can get credit for the energy they burn off. Plus you're looking at putting a lot of extra cycles on equipment not built as well as it used to be so you're burning the useful life of a hard to repair device and probably not getting paid enough to cover that, plus they more and more designed to burn as little energy as possible.

    I know there are some places where this happens though but it's more along the lines of the devices delaying their start until energy is cheap rather than being used as loads to shed excess capacity afaik.

    • bee_rider  3 days ago

      > I know there are some places where this happens though but it's more along the lines of the devices delaying their start until energy is cheap rather than being used as loads to shed excess capacity afaik.

      This is what I meant, sorry for the ambiguity. Load the washer up and kick it off whenever energy is cheap. I don’t care when it happens other than, like, that it happens once a day, so why not defer this to the power company, right?

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