Saudi Arabia is building a huge aluminium smelter, I had thought it would be solar powered, but they would need far, far more power, and of course it couldn't run at night.
http://www.bechtel.com/projects/ras-al-khair-aluminum-smelte...
So I assume this is gas fired power, which seems strange.
Compared to oil it’s harder to store and transport, and there aren’t any gas pipelines from the Gulf to neighbouring areas (unlike say Russia). If you fly over the Gulf at night, you’ll see the sea lit up from oil rigs just burning it off, so it makes sense to use it to fuel heavy industry.
The primary constituent of natural gas is methane, which has a much worse greenhouse effect than CO2, so it’s ‘greener’ to burn it rather than just releasing it into the atmosphere.
I know it might mean less money or whatever, but the universe doesn't seem to run on money so it's weird logic sacrifice the environment over something like operational uptime.
Other processes are intolerant of complete shutdown/startup cycles. Modern aluminum smelting is one of them. If everything freezes up in the production cells because of too little power for too long, it causes damage and it takes a long time to start up again. To make aluminum smelting more cycling-tolerant would require rethinking the whole plant design. Even then the cost savings from cheap but non-dispatchable renewables may not be enough to compete with existing plants powered with dispatchable electricity.
I'm not sure if this is such a huge problem. Modern operations require very few human operators, and they do not contribute too much to the actual costs. Worst thing is that you'll just have some people doing nothing waiting for cheaper energy.
> If everything freezes up in the production cells because of too little power for too long, it causes damage and it takes a long time to start up again.
It takes much less power to keep the aluminum hot than it takes to smelt it, so if power becomes too expensive for smelting, you just use a fraction of it to keep it hot in the cells.