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by Iv 2418 days ago
If you suppose a well-designed grid, I really doubt that free electricity is something that clients would refuse. Electricity is valuable, at any time of the day. There is no reason for it to go below zero.

Sure, storing energy is hard but spending it is easy.

Hell, give me free electricity and I will be running a pyrolysis rig, making biofuel for free.
1 comments
iguy 2418 days ago
No, it's not always valuable. If you get free electricity for an hour, some days of the week, then your giant biofuel plant spends a lot of time sitting idle.

It's not obvious that your mostly-idle plant is a better business than a much smaller one which runs all the time. The costs of building and maintaining the thing are real too. (Not to mention needing to design the plant to ramp up to full production in minutes, while a more traditional one might spend a day warming up all the pieces to operating temperature.)

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Iv 2418 days ago
> It's not obvious that your mostly-idle plant is a better business than a much smaller one which runs all the time.

This process is usually not profitable because of the energy cost it requires. This is why I am proposing it as a way to absorb energy surplus. But I am only talking about what would happen if you got electricity at zero cost. At negative costs, even crazier things would happen.

The reality, is that, to my knowledge, the Australian grid does not "sell" electricity for negative prices, it only "buys" it. If it were to pay clients to absorb electricity, I would just dissipate heat in well ventilated radiators, make a ton of steam, and make a show of giant tesla coils. Radiators can be made out of scrap metal, it really is a small investment that can lie dormant at no cost if negative electricity prices only happen 5% of the time.

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zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 2418 days ago
Could you please show the calculation of what it costs to build and maintain such a scrap metal radiator thing, and how much money you would have made with such a device over the last 12 months?
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iguy 2418 days ago
"dissipate heat in well ventilated radiators": you've just invented a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower , often the largest building at a power plant.
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