Comment by gus_massa
6 months ago
> It can also be "Hey, they're paying us to run resistive heaters! Turn on the artificial sun!"
It may be difficult to dump all the heat at scale. You probably need a huge cooler with fans to get active air flow. Or a water tower (that requires water) (There are regulation about extracting water from a river and returning it too hot).
Is it possible to build one of this heat dumping facilities in a zone where there is permanent snow? (Ignoring environmental and moral concerns.)
PS: Seriously, heating a swimming pool may be a nice application.
It definitely is sometimes difficult to dump power at scale. That's the source of the surplus and resulting negative price.
But it doesn't have to be big. A negative price is still a negative price, even on a small scale.
So, for instance: At home, I have electric hot water. I have some baseboard heaters in parts of the house (that I never actually use, but which I could use). I have central aircon.
All of these things could stand to be automated just for automation's sake, and that's something I'll probably do some day even with the fixed-rate electricity I buy right now.
With automation and price feeds, it's a programmatic no-brainer to switch on the electric baseboards on during the heating season during negative price events and get paid some non-zero amount to get ahead on the temperature game.
During the cooling season, I can probably stand to get paid to supercool the house for awhile.
And during any season: I normally run my electric water heater at a fairly low temperature because that's more efficient, but I'll cheerfully accept money to temporarily raise its temperature.
Or if I had an EV: Maybe I might normally like to keep it at 70% SoC for battery health, but if it's plugged in and the price is negative then I might cheerfully run it up to 85 or 90% or more.
So anyway, it's hypothetically pretty easy for an individual like me to dump a few kiloWatts in a useful way.
A thousand such people make it easy to dump a few megaWatts.
A million such people make it easy to dump a few gigaWatts. (And a million sounds like a lot, until one counts the eventuality of smartly-connected EVs.)
> It may be difficult to dump all the heat at scale. You probably need a huge cooler with fans to get active air flow. Or a water tower (that requires water) (There are regulation about extracting water from a river and returning it too hot).
You could probably just boil off your water, instead of returning any?
It would be funny, to use the steam to generate electricity.
> You could probably just boil off your water, instead of returning any?
You get a lot of salt residue that you have to dispose. The usual nuclear plant tower [1] evaporates most of the water to dump heat, but returns a small part of it to avoid collecting salt. But it has to be not to hot nor too salty to avoid killing the fishes.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+power+plant+cooling+... [How to I link to the images pages?!?! Google changed the format of the URL and I can't find the correct &something=xyz to make a short link to the images :( .]
Yeah, they did butcher the Image Search URLs pretty terribly.
Ye olde format still works: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=nuclear+power+plant...
...and that ultimately lands at https://www.google.com/search?q=nuclear+power+plant+cooling+... which also works.