171–180 of 419 posts
Surely Bitcoin miners will snatch up these opportunities soon. Cheap electricity can be translated into money if you have the mining equipment.
Not really. Mining has high capital costs which can't be covered if the energy source isn't reliable. Mines need to run 24/7 to be profitable.
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> Enron "Quien se quemó con leche, ve una vaca y llora." It can seem weird to have an excess of power availability, but it's a consequence of electric power not being easily stored -- electricity is just a good energy _transmission_ system. While using electrostatics (batteries) is possible for storing very small amonts of energy, when you think at a state or country scale, it's just too much to store. This means exc…
To save you the Google tour: > Quien se quemó con leche, ve una vaca y llora. This appears to be a saying that corresponds to the English saying "A burnt child dreads the fire."
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Yeah, if I was gonna build a desalination plant built to use Just a big resistor in a big tank (or pond), a big fume hood and coil to another tank. Capital cost can probably be minimized a whole lot.
You can use sun light directly for that. Just paint your boiler black, maybe concentrate some sunlight with cheap mirrors.
Also, you only want to run the desalination plant when the electricity price is too low ("below zero" with the transmission included), so you want generators for most of the time, when you actually sell the power.
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Where I live its about 25c (of Australian Dollar) for 1kwh but you only get 7c back. So a real battery would be much preferable.
Due to subsidies, in the US people dumping home solar into the grid usually get back more than the market rate.
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Exactly - this will finally make them think twice about installing more generation capacity and will force them to consider installing battery storage or other solutions to fix issues on the grid. These non-generation solutions exist, but utilities love to just install more generation because it's in their playbook and they don't want to innovate.
> utilities love to just install more generation because it's in their playbook and they don't want to innovate. I'm curious, how did you reach this conclusion?
Local governments and state regulators have finally started to push back against and are now forcing utilities to consider new solutions to grid congestion. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/non-wires-alternatives-what...
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Capital costs vs. marginal costs. You're going to build a $100M desalination plant and run it for three hours a day? That's a ton of money sitting idle most of the day, far more than what is recovered with zero operating costs. (This is called the utilization factor -- how long a piece of equipment is used vs. staying idle) Ideally you want useful processes with low capital costs and expensive marginal/energy costs.…
In the oil market, stabilization of price occurs only because a handful of countries (really just Saudi Arabia) maintain extra capacity. They don't run their capital assets at 100%. This is where capitalism fails. You need one absolute authority, some autocrat who doesn't care that their processing plant isn't running at 100%, who is able to react instantly without making new capital improvements. This is the place f…
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I imagine something like this would happen, if this is a "real" economic phenomenon rather than a quirky price/billing system. I think that it's something like that though, a goof in a not-quite-designed collection of old energy funding/billing setups and newer green energy stuff. Otherwise there'd be someone just consuming electricity for pay. I don't think this is "retail."
the point is that "just consuming" the electricity is nontrivial. Suppose you've been paid to take some number of megawatt hours of energy. Okay: What do you do with it? At the least useful, you have to safely convert it into heat it without damaging something. More useful would be storing it. If you know how to solve that, yeah, you will make money.
You could literally attempt to boil the ocean, if you want to be ambitious. Heat your pool, for a domestic application.
Last time there were "weird" issues with power someone was gaming the system: Enron. Something about this article just seems off to me, something isn't right from a technology point of view, and I suspect someone is manipulating things. (No, I do not have evidence. Just a feeling like this isn't such a hard problem to solve technically.)
I don't truly understand this "problem". I understand storing the energy in batteries is currently very expensive economically and materially. However I believe there are plenty of "goods" (irrespective of if they are bulk materials, or partially processed products) which have a high processing energy per volume ratio (this does not need to be recoverable stored energy). Allow me to give an example: currently we have…
I think Pumped Hydroelectric Storage is what you are looking for. I've seen a few of them here in Switzerland. I think many were originally built out with the train system's grid for it's reliably scheduled low and high capacity times. http://energystorage.org/energy-storage/technologies/pumped-...
http://schwungrad-energie.com/schwungrads-success-eu-horizon...
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You "currently" have a drought, but otherwise you have plenty of water, so a desalination plant isn't a wise investment (yet). Also keep in mind that these are energy spikes that cause negative prices, whereas most industrial uses need a constant and even supply. These spikes are countered by periods of little to no energy . This is the biggest problem with (most) renewables, they cannot entirely replace coal or nucl…
> Energy storage (at cost) is an unsolved problem. Super-true. It's actually pretty fascinating how it's currently done in the grid; storage of energy is often done by converting it (at significant efficiency loss) to a mechanical format. Those formats can get very creative---traditional is "pump a bunch of water uphill into an artificial reservoir," but in areas where big dry mines are available, capping the mine an…