[schmidtleonard]

Someone at the generation facility ran the numbers and found that the grid was able to dispose of excess energy for peanuts but installing and maintaining a dedicated electronic load cost more than peanuts.

I'd recommend digging elsewhere for conspiracy bait. This is a mild curiosity at best.

[hinkley]

This is why we don’t move data center load to the coldest available data center to reduce the AC power fraction of the cost. The cost of electricity is a significant fraction of the overall cost but not high enough to make up for stranded assets. Computers not running during their best years is expensive.

But I’m not sure that’s entirely correct, and maybe it’s time to revisit this.

Any system that is selling responsiveness as part of their service has to keep a certain amount of equipment sitting idle. That’s just how queuing theory works. So while you cannot move all server load to the coldest available zone, we should still be able to run that center near capacity and use the hottest one for all reserve capacity.

Power plants also have to deal with fines for exceeding emissions limits, but I suspect the problem here is that Bayesian analysis tells them that if a plant has to kick on early for some reason (early school release day, or another plant exceeded a maintenance window), it will still be needed for sure an hour from now, so it’s better to leave it running for 45 minutes doing nothing than to cycle it.

[petertodd]

> This is a mild curiosity at best.

Exactly. There are genuine economic/engineering reasons for negative prices to occasionally exist. But in a well-designed, well-run, grid price will be negative only a small minority of the time. It just doesn't make sense to install a bunch of expensive equipment to provide this service when sufficient capacity exists from "happy accidents" like spare battery storage.

In the long run, better managed solar and wind should make negative prices a fairly rare event.

[eru]

Once you sign up customers for 'cheaper electricity, but you have to agree to the occasional loadshedding', you can probably also sign them up for a bit of 'oh, and please burn some more electricity, when we tell you to'.

The former is already happening and useful, the latter would be a relatively simple and easy add-on that could be used to offer ever so slightly cheaper electricity.

[jounker]

My washing machine has a timer. I do the wash when local electricity rates are near zero.

[eru]

Yes, and you could imagine telling your utility: just kick off the laundry anytime in this time interval, in return for cheaper electricity.