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In Australia it's not uncommon on moderate temperature sunny days for the wholesale price to enter the negatives. Lots of solar production, with minimal heating and cooling demands.

Many plans offer a 3 hour period where electricity is free to encourage shifting your load to that time. Which is amazing if you're able to charge an electric vehicle in that time, a standard single phase charger could provide 21kw/h in that 3 window all for free.

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It's interesting that we're seeing situations now where we have excess energy, and can't think of a good use for it that doesn't just involve storage.

Kind of like a home energy dump that does something tangible, like bake a potato or something. You could come home in the afternoon and be rewarded with a reheated meat pie, or some chips that are automatically dumped into an air fryer.

You could also store that excess energy, and use that stored energy to bake a potato only when you want to, or something.

I've heard that aluminum smelting makes for a good "energy dump" and actually is almost more important to the economy at energy price aribtrage than as a source of aluminum. But Iceland and a few other places have already taken a lot of this market and maybe we already have as much aluminum smelting as we need.

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