The solution is actually what's called a "dummy load". Get paid to waste energy and heat up the planet a tiny bit more, gotta love it.
Not that it matters, because the effect would be miniscule in any case.
Either way I think people are overthinking it though.
With enough solar panels deployed, you could still argue that they change the albedo of the Earth and therefore it's temperature.
Now to figure out how much exactly you need to take into account the solar panel absorption spectrum & the albedo of the earth.
Aside from software integration to remotely control household PV systems, is there anything else needed to curtail during negative price events?
https://www.reddit.com/r/energy/comments/1iu2kkz/solar_curta...
You mean crypto miner.
If I buy a device for $100 that, given free electricity, will mine $500 of cryptocurrency in its useful life - I can easily lose money if I run it less than 20% of the time.
And I doubt electricity is negative priced >20% of the time.
Rather than coming up with some grand scheme, maybe it would be good if our dishwashers and washing machines could listen to the grid and activate when power cost was negative. (We may need to coordinate a bit though, so we don’t all activate at once).
If you think of it, a dryer is sort of a combination of a flywheel and a heating element, so it should be the over-provisioner’s best friend. IMO a real failure has been not taking advantage of our appliances.
I know there are some places where this happens though but it's more along the lines of the devices delaying their start until energy is cheap rather than being used as loads to shed excess capacity afaik.
This is what I meant, sorry for the ambiguity. Load the washer up and kick it off whenever energy is cheap. I don’t care when it happens other than, like, that it happens once a day, so why not defer this to the power company, right?
Also there are downsides to having clothes just sit there for hours potentially before you dry them. They can get pretty dank from the moisture and for dryers some clothes need to be removed immediately when the cycle finishes.
So it's already possible to incentivize people correctly with price signals, at least in some regions of the world. But people are not yet familiar with this. I guess that will change as the pricing between dynamic and traditional contracts keeps diverging. With a traditional contract, you are essentially paying the average evening peak price all the time. With a dynamic contract, you get access to the cheaper and even negative rates.
Anything that would really love free energy also cost a lot to build and maintain/operate besides electricity. So much that a few hundred hours of free (or even better than free) energy a year is far from enough when you need >90% uptime to make sense. Maybe it makes you go from 95 to 85%, but still clearly it's far more than there are sunshine hours.
The problem is that things that can use bulk energy productively like electrolysers, hydrocarbon crackers, smelters, AI training farms, etc. are very expensive and having them on warm standby but idle most of the time waiting for good grid weather makes for bad returns on the capital expenditure and operational costs.
He's just trying to burn energy because a negative rate means he's getting paid to use it.
So sure - it's great to give that energy a functional use first (ex - charge his batteries) but eventually he runs out of functional ways to use the energy but could still be making money by using it.
Enter the desire for a dummy load.
It's straight forward to add a giant resistive load that just converts electricity back to heat.
I can get 10kw heaters for just a couple hundred bucks or 1.5kw heaters for literally $20 usd. And that also switches on/off easily.
For hydro... just boiling water with a heater is going to be pretty much unbeatable if we're playing the "waste energy" game. No need to approximate it slowly with your pump motor and risk other infrastructure.
If you really wanted to be clever, your best bet would probably be to turn it into a laser beam and send it back to space. Would mimic that energy getting reflected instead of absorbed, albeit through a pretty inefficient and convoluted process.
Might make more sense to run carbon capture devices at that point, but again - in either of these cases we're back into the "it's getting pretty expensive to waste this energy" spot.
New designs store the power in batteries, but most locomotives used in the US still have a compartment filled with fans and resistors instead.
You can build this at a small scale pretty cheaply but the connection to sink meaningful amounts of power would quickly become a significant part of the expense.