Comment by consp
13 hours ago
We see that quite often here in the summer as the energy price sometimes drops to minus 60ct/kWh (more often it hovers around -5 to -10). It is pretty much "please use everything now" to avoid grid issues. It often happens on very clear days with lots of wind.
Mine bitcoin, run LLM inference, smelt aluminum, make synthetic fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2.
This ignores capital and opportunity cost. Building a GPU data center or chemical plant costs a lot. If you only use it 20% of the time, you're effectively paying 5x more for that capital equipment.
> make synthetic fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2.
that would actually be my preferred solution (if only it was less energy inefficient, sigh).
If the marginal value of electricity is negative, what matters if it is energy inefficient?
3 replies →
The problem here is that the production of hydrocarbons, ammonia, etc. from electricity can only make back its high upfront investment when it runs basically 24/7. This is a challenge for renewables.
In China which recently opened a large off-grid green ammonia plant in Chifeng, they use multiple tiers of energy storage to ensure constant electric power availability.
The problem is the capital cost of any of that type of equipment sitting around idle or under-capacity, ready to go when the electricity price goes down. It's likely more profitable to run them most of the time, even with positive electric rates, and then only stop using them when rates are exceptionally high ("load shedding").
This is why you see most opportunistic electricity consumption systems doing resistive heating - this equipment is inexpensive.