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Comment by mgiampapa | Hacker News Reader

At the rate that solar costs are falling we really don't. We just over-build and energy during the day is nearly zero cost. There is no problem with curtailing excess solar production, or opportunistically use that daytime power curve to run non time critical industrial processes.

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Then you would have a lot of excess energy during the summer and this energy would then look for an use. Metal and cement production are very likely candidates and seasonality would be then dictated by the market.

Depends if the capital cost of the increased manufacturing capacity is worth it to make up for lost winter production. I'm not all that convinced.

Also consider the workforce differences too, since presumably this would also need to be on leave for a portion of the year.

No one knows exactly where economy of scale will land us, but much like Moore's law the trend in the data is there. Of course any major change in these industries are going to have knock on effects. We have been automating the steel production process in 1st world countries for years simply due to the cost of human labor. I expect that trend will continue and those plant operators will effectively end up being paid to work on other things on non operation days.

I think green hydrogen production is the obvious use case, but smelting, carbon capture and other things you would do with "free" power all make sense.

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