[larsrc]

We fools here in Germany sometimes _pay_ to get rid of excess electricity when it's very sunny and windy. How about having some rock crushing machines that instead use that cheap electricity to make more sand?

Thanks for the puns, too.

[pfdietz]

One of the proposals for exploiting zero (or negative) electricity prices is storage of the heat at high temperature in refractory solids. This would be used by people who normally burn a fuel for the heat. Instead, they can preheat air and reduce the fuel needed (perhaps reduced to zero).

Firebrick works up to about 1000 C. A spinoff from MIT is using special nickel-doped chromium oxide (chromia) bricks, which can work up to 1800 C, about the temperature of a natural gas-air flame. These bricks are electrically conductive and can act as their own heating elements.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91129126/these-bricks-conduct-el...

https://electrifiedthermal.com/

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/130800

[epistasis]

It's quite likely that the cost of idle capital is much higher than the cost of paying others to accept electricity. Depending on the price swings, a battery may be a much better investment.

[outlog]

better make it a sand battery: https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/03/10/sand-batteries-cou...

[cdchn]

I hate to say this, but why aren't the Bitcoin miners jumping all over that?

[applied_heat]

Because the mining equipment is expensive and the duration of free electricity intervals are outweighed by expensive electricity intervals

[slt2021]

Related: Bitcoin miner RIOT made $32 mln by reducing or being willing to reduce if needed — its energy use consumption.

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/03/texas-bitcoin-profit...

A company such as Riot also can profit by buying power at negotiated rates ahead of time — retail power companies allow big companies to lock in prices that way — then selling it back into the state market when energy prices soar during extreme heat or cold. In Riot’s case, when electricity prices soared during the summer heat wave, Riot sold power back to TXU, a Dallas-based electricity provider, which sold it back to the grid.

But if the value of Bitcoin is low and the cost of electricity is high, crypto companies can make more money selling power than mining Bitcoin. In August 2023, Riot reported selling 300 Bitcoins for a net proceeds of $8.6 million. Meanwhile, the company said it earned $24.2 million in credits to its electric bill for selling power back to the grid.

[throwup238]

Metal foundries in Europe generally have dibs with large, long term power purchasing contracts. IIRC there's even some legislation that favours them since they're a national security resource.

[niklasbuschmann]

I assume there are taxes and transmission fees on top of the spot electricity price

[jagrsw]

Yup, in one of eu countries i have it on my bill: it's ~0.10EUR/kWh electricity and additional ~0.15-0.20EUR/kWh for taxes + transmission + maintenance, IIRC

[Someone]

Free power doesn’t mean free production.

There’s also labor, wear on the machines and the lost opportunity of using your money to do something else. Building such crushing machines and only use them x% of the time (for, for now, fairly small values of x) may not be a good investment.

[westurner]

So, energy storage should be lucrative and incentivized for us to solve the Duck Curve, and Alligator Curve, and overcharging the grid forces the price to zero or unlucratively below problems.

For firms with depreciating datacenter assets that are underutilized, a Research Coin like Grid Coin or an @home distributed computation project can offset costs

Datacenters scrap old compute - that there's hardly electronics recycling for - rather than keep it online due to relative cost in FLOPS/kWhr and the cost of conditioned space.

Doesn't electronics recycling recover the silica?

Can we make CPUs out of graphene made out of recycled plastic?

Can we make superconductive carbon computers that waste less electricity as heat?

Hopefully, Proof of Work miners that aren't operating on grants have an incentive to maximize energy efficiency with graphene ASICs and FPGAs and now TPUs

[iamacyborg]

Time to setup some gravitational batteries to exploit that opportunity.