Comment by horsawlarway
3 days ago
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.