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Comment by rosege | Hacker News Reader

Yeah I had thought surely they can find a use for free electricity rather than just turning it off

They should accelerate a particle with it.

EDIT: Whip it around in circles with giant electromagnets.

Free electricity that turns off half the time and run basically randomly for the other half? Without a battery it’s useless, and you have to pay for that battery. Treating the electric grid as a battery shouldn’t be free. It’s just in this case they found the cost of battery to be greater than the value of the electricity they’re creating.

> Free electricity that turns off half the time and run basically randomly for the other half? Without a battery it’s useless

I can't imagine that's true. Spot instances come to mind.

This island uses water as a battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG4Q4kXal_U , when there's a lot of wind spinning the wind turbines, they pump up water up a mountain, and when it's less windy they let the water fall through a hydroelectric plant...

I keep coming back to electrowinning iron. When I search for papers it looks like people have started working on it again in the last ten years. I think it's not particularly high tech. Intermittent tolerant and scalable.

In SA there are some pump-hydro storage projects in the pipeline which should smooth out some of these variations.

Good stuff. I was wondering if maybe a desalination plant could work..

How? Or was that meant ironically?

Desalination plants use a lot of power, but it's not obvious to me how to use it to store power.

The idea there isn't that you store power but rather that you only run the plant when power is cheap (and then keep a large enough fresh water reservoir to serve demand until the next cheap electricity arrives). Demand management rather than supply management, effectively.

Yeah, the problem is that it's not easy to store very large amounts of water (at least not near where the Adelaide Desalination plant is).

I believe they can pump the water up into the hill, so I guess it's not entirely out of the question.

Decal plant when the power is cheap and well water the rest of the time?

Adelaide has a desal plant. It was even in the news today: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-07/how-will-the-sa-desal...

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