Desalination can beat batteries for excess energy

https://spectrum.ieee.org/pumped-water-energy-storage

by Brajeshwar • 3 years ago

112 130 3 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

Is the idea to use excess solar power to desalinate salt water instead of mine crypto currency? At a high level that seems smart.

It seems like the general idea is to build out excess capacity on the desalinization side and run the desalinization plant at less than full throughput during peak consumer demand (i.e. peak of the duck curve?).

mdale• 3 years ago

Lol. Almost like making drinking water and water that can be used to grow food is a better use of energy than boiling a small ocean of water on math designed to create artificial scarcity :)

dragontamer4• 3 years ago

The opposite.

The various policies we have are for Aluminum Smelting plants, Desal, and other heavy-electricity industries to use excess solar (or nuclear) power during peak-energy times, and to turn off during peak-usage times to help balance the grid.

On an individual level, we might be able to even do this for air-conditioning, washing machines, or car-charging (if you have a PHEV or EV).

Cryptocoins then perverted the models we created to earn money from this through mining (using energy during peak-energy and turning off during peak-usage). But the "intent" for those laws has always been for industry and/or individual grid-level issues.

--------------

For low-utilization machines (ex: washing machines and dryers), this makes perfect sense. The main issue is that for high-utilization machines (ie: all industry wishes to run at 100%, rather than 80% or 50%), you end up doubling or more the cost of CapEx.

Ex: You'll need twice as many Desal plants if they only operate during the most efficient 50% of times during the week. Which might be worthwhile, but you have to run the math. Every hour these plants are shutdown for power-saving purposes is an hour that they are sitting away / depreciating.

vlovich12311• 3 years ago

I can’t imagine that’s how industries could actually run. I think they can benefit from cheaper costs to absorb excess electricity or reduce capacity slightly when it gets too expensive, but shutting down an aluminum smelting plant seems like a non-starter as they need to run constantly 24/7 and require long startup/shutdown times. Same goes for desal - you’re not going to economically produce sufficient amounts of water just trying to time the energy grid.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/3g78nj/are_al...

breischl3• 3 years ago

we might be able to even do this for air-conditioning, washing machines, or car-charging (if you have a PHEV or EV).

No _might_ about it, this currently happens for A/C, and is just getting going for car charging (see EV Managed Charging as a category).

Also some functions of commercial/industrial facilities that can be ramped more easily, eg shut off half of the hallway lighting in an office building. I think I recall things like rock crushers being turned off, but I might be misremembering that.

F-W-M2• 3 years ago

Energy costs vary not only over the day but per quarter hour in each hour, e.g. during the morning the last quarter is cheaper than the first for each hour. So you don't necessarily have to shut down the machines, maybe you can just move the most energy expensive phase into another quarter.

If you are brewing beer you have times where you have to heat it and times where it needs to sit at a given temperature. Try to optimize the process to heat during cheaper quarter hours.

patall• 3 years ago

You assume that it is all linear which it may not be. Osmosis at power P may produce X litres of water per time unit while osmosis at power 4P may produce only 2X litres per time unit. And thus be viable only when the electricity price is N times lower.

reactordev• 3 years ago

”On an individual level, we might be able to even do this”

At Tendril, we did this in 2017. We called it Orchestrated Energy.

jon_richards• 3 years ago

The most egregious broken window fallacy I’ve heard is a vc claiming that cryptocurrency lets you “virtually” transfer energy from areas with low prices to areas with high prices (without power lines!).

BiteCode_dev• 3 years ago

Consuming energy productively > storing it?

Well, yeah...

tantalor• 3 years ago

What's the difference

vlovich12311• 3 years ago

Storing it lets you feed back that energy at a different time (e.g. night) but requires a lot of expensive hardware (i.e. batteries) + you have to deal with losses involved with storing & retrieving that energy. Consuming it directly doesn’t require batteries and desal plants are cheaper than battery plants + going to be fewer losses.

It’s a stupid comparison though because the point of batteries is to get to net 0 and desal plants don’t help with that. But it’s not a great sign for renewables achieving net 0 at the grid level that a process that is so energy intensive for getting so little water out is a better use of electricity than batteries.

governmentdude• 3 years ago

Another good use is making hydrogen for ammonia.

brilee• 3 years ago

https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/ I looked at a variety of these ideas and most of them are bad. Desalination is another one I looked at quickly (did not add it to the blog post), but I recall it being at least 10-100x more expensive than just buying batteries.

cogman10• 3 years ago

I think the desal math changes a bit because it also produces a product beyond just batteries. For particularly arid or water poor locations where you need desal anyways, seems like this could be a win (think islands or the middle east).

That said, you'd probably still want batteries to supply power to things like a desal plant when water levels are low.

thelastgallon5• 3 years ago

The lifetime of a Li plant is just 10 years? Batteries lose a bit of capacity at 10 years, maybe still have 80 - 90% capacity. These can run for decades.

vlovich12311• 3 years ago

New research shows that hybrid energy grids that rely on a mix of renewable and fossil fuel energy are up to the task, so long as the timing of freshwater production is right. In some situations, it may even be more financially and energy efficient to put that generated energy toward desalination rather than store it in batteries for use later.

And this is why I remain skeptical of renewables as base load energy. The only carbon free base load energy tech remains nuclear which is also perfectly capable of performing desal during off-peak times.

tmoertel• 3 years ago

Geothermal also works for carbon-free base load, and newer drilling techniques made it viable in areas without high surface heat.

barbazoo2• 3 years ago

And this is why I remain skeptical of renewables as base load energy.

Someone should tell countries like Germany then \s

https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/german...

himinlomax• 3 years ago

Germany is currently producing nearly half of their electricyt from coal and gas right now.

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/DE

tsimionescu2• 3 years ago

Yes, someone really should. Germany is currently one of, if not the, worse polluters in the EU, by far. Compare it to France, which produces most of its electricity from nuclear power, and thus produces almost half the CO2.

ProjectArcturis2• 3 years ago

Somebody always wants to tout nuclear, even when that's not the topic at hand. Nuclear is equally unsuitable to solar as a stand-alone energy source. Nuclear energy is produced constantly throughout the day, and would not match the daytime peaks in electricity consumption.

Anyway, this article is discussing one of many new ways that power usage can be shifted around during the day, which makes solar able to provide a LARGER share of our overall energy.

vlovich12311• 3 years ago

No, this article is saying that if you have a hybrid grid of fossil fuels & solar, desal is a cheaper application than storing in batteries & using solar power banked in batteries at night. If you have a full renewable grid, that advantage disappears. That’s because the price differential comes from arbitrage & that price differential makes desal cheaper than building capacity.

I bring up nuclear whenever there’s a discussion of grid energy to provide a reality check that solar is not able to get us to net 0 by 2050 in any way regardless of clever new ideas. By contrast nuclear actually does have that capability and it’s not purely theoretical nor “hey what if we productionized some new hypothetical theoretical idea at massive scale and ignore all unintended side effects” - we have plenty of existence proof that nuclear is a drop-in replacement for fossil fuels & thus actually very quickly reduces the need for them in the grid energy mix whereas no such existence proof really exists for renewables (yes - someone brought up Denmark but that’s not a repeatable situation because they are one of the windiest places on earth and wind doesn’t have the same critical downsides that solar does for grid power).

robocat• 3 years ago

Nuclear energy is produced constantly throughout the day, and would not match the daytime peaks in electricity consumption.

Nuclear is perfectly good at load following until the U is nearly burnt: the French do it.

The reason nuclear is most suited to base load is because the capital costs are so high it makes sense to use a reactor as close to 100% utilisation as you can.

laurencerowe3• 3 years ago

Unfortunately nuclear is now horribly expensive to build so we’re just not going to build that much of it. By contrast renewables (and batteries) are getting cheaper and cheaper so we are building lots of them.

In 2022 Denmark generated 62% (+12% from 2021) of its electricity from renewables (excluding biomass which seems suspect to me) while France generated 63% (-5% from 2021) from Nuclear.

I think you can make a case that nuclear is competitive for 100% carbon free grids (though by the time it’s built batteries will have gotten far cheaper.) But it seems clear that renewables are by far the cheapest and quickest way to get to ~80% carbon free grids.

vlovich12311• 3 years ago

Yes yes. Renewable proponents really love trotting out costs while ignoring the only reason costs have gone up is because we significantly ramped down our nuclear production efforts. Same would happen if we did that for solar. But that’s a choice we get to make. Also nuclear construction costs are particularly outsized in the US where regulations are intentionally constructed to strangle it. Japan, China, and Europe build it much more cheaply.

Existing heavy water reactors could be built more cheaply than they are now. And MSR/thorium designs are a step function cheaper beyond that because they generate even less waste, don’t need expensive fail-safe mechanisms because it’s inheritently physically impossible to melt down, and don’t need water to cool down which is both a cost savings & avoids the issue of warming waters due to global warming impacting the ability for reactors to run at times.

China has already started building MSR designs and it sucks that the DOE is dragging their feet in approving these designs & focusing instead on SMR designs. The regulatory capture of the US beuracracy by fossil fuel companies is a huge problem.

it seems clear that renewables are by far the cheapest and quickest way to get to 80% carbon free grids

Got any existence proof for this claim? We’re building renewables as fast as we can and countries seem to generally tap out at ~20% ammortized across the year and are growing extremely slowly (~1% each year). By comparison France runs 90% carbon free and that’s because of their nuclear grid. Batteries will decrease over time but we still don’t yet know what grid-scale renewable base load looks like & I don’t think that 80% number is correct considering that baseload is 30-40% of maximum load (i.e. best case peak without batteries is 60-70%). But all the solar proponents also seem to ignore a major headwind for solar which is that while we build out more & more capacity, our energy demands grow faster than that. We’ve electrified 2% of consumer cars, 0% of trucks, 0% of ships, 0% of airplanes. Electrifying cars is going to add an insane amount of demands on the grid & solar can’t keep up (batteries either). And yes, there’s the argument of using batteries in EVs to do the grid balancing but we don’t actually have that tech & 0 regulations requiring it meaning that in 2035 which is the target when ostensibly we stop creating new ICE cars, we still won’t have that ability.

Building out nuclear capacity is still by far the quickest & cheapest option to not only convert our existing energy to carbon free but also to keep up with ever growing demands. Remember - the more capacity you build, the cheaper it gets per MW. Also, nuclear is way more land efficient than solar which is a separate unrelated discussion but also relevant. Again, my argument is not to stop solar investments but to remove all the regulatory and bueracratic roadblocks that inhibit nuclear fission so that those companies can compete fairly.

Denmark is an absolute best case because they are geographically advantaged for wind. Wind is much more resilient and cheaper than solar but is also more geography dependent. Fission can be installed anywhere.

DelaneyM• 3 years ago

It’s fascinating that this is a paper - we did the math about 20 years ago and have been using excess electricity for desalination in Cayman ever since.

jmyeet• 3 years ago

We love rediscovering things and writing papers [1].

[1] https://fliptomato.wordpress.com/2007/03/19/medical-research...

thechao2• 3 years ago

Texas tried to do this in the early 2000s; we even built a bunch of desalination plants (here's a comment about this I made recently):

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38422172#38424191

Long-story–short (based on my experience with these chuckleheads): it was killed because the current political establishment didn't own the desalination plants, so there was no way they could personally profit off of them; they own oil/gas/fracking & ERCOT.

passwordoops• 3 years ago

Sadly that's just about true for most things, whether it's city state or federal. God forbid Congress tries to tackle the health care industrial complex, it might hit their portfolio!

m463• 3 years ago

Isn't there an unused desalination plant in santa barbara?

EDIT it seems like it may be back on?

https://www.sbck.org/our-work/advocacy/water-supply/desalina...

atoav2• 3 years ago

Texas generally seems to have chosen an odd path politically, which to me has been strangely highlighted by their failure to supply their own people with electricity. Aside from the usual left-right dichtomy¹ one could start to consider to just elect people who at least pretend to care about the problem. Electricity has become kinda important.

¹: A divide that is seen more as a centrist — far-right divide from my european perspective.

datadrivenangel• 3 years ago

Really impressive simulation of using fresh-water storage tanks as energy storage in regions that use desalination.

The cost of overbuilding desalination capacity is non-zero though, and energy is only about ~1/3rd of the typical cost for a cubic meter of water overall depending on the plant, so the marginal savings may not be as big as we would like here.

p1mrx• 3 years ago

this economic efficiency “mostly vanishes” under scenarios with 100 percent renewable grids, says Conejo, because the cost of producing electricity is similar throughout the day.

I don't understand this statement. Shouldn't the cost of consuming electricity vary as the supply of renewables changes throughout the day?

thebruce87m• 3 years ago

In the UK we have cheaper energy tariffs at night for charging EVs. It’s about a quarter of the price as during the day. As I understand it this is because we overproduce on renewables at night.

Animats3• 3 years ago

If you only run the desalination plant when energy is cheap, plant cost per liter of water goes up. May or may not be a win. Probably a win for small, isolated plants, say for powering and watering a small island. Large grid-connected plants, don't know.

thelastgallon5• 3 years ago

Water probably isn't grid connected like electricity. Nor does the supply need to perfectly match the demand every second. There is quite a bit of water storage in the system.

There might be pumps, in addition to just gravity assisted transportation of water. When energy is cheap, we can do both desalinate + transport.

cperciva• 3 years ago

You're missing the point. If you need 24 m^3/day of fresh water, you can have a desalination plant producing 1 m^3/hour and a water tank to match supply to demand. But if you only want to run the plant for 3 hours/day when electricity is cheap, you now need a plant which can produce 8 m^3/hour.

There's a tradeoff -- spending more building the desalination plant makes it possible to run at a lower duty cycle so you can spend less on the electricity.

laurencerowe3• 3 years ago

But mainland desalination plants are connected to the electricity grid.

The problem with only running them part of the time is that the fixed capital and other operational costs of the plant are now split over a smaller amount of water produced so that water is more expensive than if you ran the plant all the time paying more for electricity at other times of the day.

dragontamer4• 3 years ago

All water infrastructure in mainland America is stored in large reservoirs / lakes and/or water-towers for future use.

If it takes 1GW-hr to make I dunno, a billion gallons of water or whatever, then it might be cheaper to store a billion-gallons of water + build a 2nd desal plant rather than trying to build a 1GW-hr Li-ion battery.

That's the real question that's being discussed here. What's cheaper? Additional Desal plants + water storage? Or Giant-batteries?

Presumably, pumped-hydro is off the table (which is true in some geographies). Pumped-hydro is an effective form of GW-hr sized energy storage but is somewhat frustrating at how limited the geography can be for it in practice.

bryanlarsen2• 3 years ago

I don't think the geography at the Ludington pumped hydro storage plant is particularly uncommon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludington_Pumped_Storage_Power...

credit_guy• 3 years ago

At least in the US it is not a win.

The Carlsbad desalination plant [1] cost $1 billion to build, and it produces 190000 tons of desalinated water per day, or 5.7 million tons per month. Assuming a 6% financing cost, and 30 years amortization, you pay $6 million per month, or about $1 per ton of fresh water. That's a cost you incur whether you desalinate the water or not. If you decide to run the plant at 50%, then that's $2 per ton.

It takes 3.6 kWh to desalinate a ton of water. The cost of electricity in California is about $0.12/kWh for industrial users, so that's about $0.44 per ton of desalinated water.

Let's say you switch from the current electricity providers to solar generation that is absolutely free. Then you save $0.44 for each ton, but incur an additional capital cost of $1.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba...

Animats3• 3 years ago

OK, that's useful. Not a win at current plant and power costs.

jimnotgym6• 3 years ago

If you electrolyze seawater, to make hydrogen when the grid is over producing...and then you burn it to produce electricity when the grid is in need....can you capture the waste water from the exhaust... and call the entire process desalination?

loufe• 3 years ago

The energy conversion losses in the cycle you describe are enormous.

thsksbd3• 3 years ago

Not enormous, but not insignificant either.

jimnotgym6• 3 years ago

But are they more or less than reverse osmosis?

fbdab103• 3 years ago

If energy becomes "free" does it matter? If solar continues on its current trajectory, there needs to be some kind of sink to utilize the energy or it is all going to turn into bitcoins.

thsksbd3• 3 years ago

I worked on this a little bit. You still need to energetically pay the entropic cost of separating salt from water, and the kinetic over-potential (on the electrodes). Also these cells hate running in reverse. Ruins their lifespan. Overall it is still not viable.

Your idea to use it to iron out the economics, though, might have some merit if the price fluctuations are high enough (which is what motivated us to begin with)

jimnotgym6• 3 years ago

Is the cost more or less than reverse osmosis, that is the real question.

calamari40652• 3 years ago

In theory, sure. Hydrogen fuel cells will spit out water as a waste product, that's probably the easiest way. You could directly burn the captured hydrogen or hydrox gas and power a conventional steam turbine. You'd then have to condense the exhaust gas, which is mainly steam, but that's not terribly complicated.

The problem is that the amount of energy you get back would be fairly small in comparison to the input energy. It might not be economically practical. The amount of energy you can reasonably store per unit of input energy might not ever surpass the cost of the equipment to extract the energy and put it back into the grid.

There's a minimum energy cost in separating water from salt. Salt dissociated into water has a lower energy state than separate salt and water molecules. You have to put that much energy back into the salt ions to pull them out of solution, and they will keep that energy until dissociated again.

So you have to pay the cost of entropy, then pay for all the energy loss in the combustion, capture, and conversion stages. I'm not sure if you'd get enough energy out to ever be worth the trouble.

jimnotgym6• 3 years ago

But is the cost any higher than reverse osmosis?

senectus1• 3 years ago

doesn't the water used to create hydrogen need to be "clean" and desal'd first?

jimnotgym6• 3 years ago

Why is that? Does the salt foul the electrodes? I thought the salt might improve conduction through the fluid?

thelastgallon5• 3 years ago

Also, we can charge EVs. Grid connected batteries may or may not use the energy, but EVs will use some portion of it every day, and can be charged again the next day when there is excess energy.

Power price goes negative +200M times/year, just in the US and it is increase. It would be wonderful to get paid for charging EV. Tesla Electric customers report making as much as $150 a day[1]. Car batteries are bigger than powerwall, EV owners can make quite a bit of money by participating in VPP (Virtual Power Plant).

(1) https://electrek.co/2023/07/05/tesla-electric-customers-repo...

sandworm1012• 3 years ago

It would take a great many discounted electric bills to justify the extra wear on the batteries that would result from the extra daily charge/discharges.

led76• 3 years ago

I'm not sure it would have much of an adverse impact. Driving the car is constantly charging / discharging it (regen braking).

I think it's more about how deep the cycles go -- just don't let the grid drain below like 30-40% battery and it likely would have no meaningful impact long term.

gwbas1c4• 3 years ago

When people plug in their cars:

1: They expect them to start charging.

2: They expect them be charged when they return.

Please don't let your imagination run away with schemes like this. The incentives might be nice, but they'll only attract people who understand them and are in a situation to take advantage of them.

bryanlarsen2• 3 years ago

I dispute that. Ontario Ultra-low-overnight rates let me charge my car overnight for $2 or during peak periods for $25. Not too many people are going to ignore savings like that.

I just tell my car to make sure it's charged & warmed by 7AM and it takes care of the rest.

If I had the opportunity to join VPP I'd just tell it to make sure that it was at 80% at 7AM and never below 50% any other time.

edent4• 3 years ago

I think every EV I've driven has a charging timer - so I've been able to say "only charge overnight when prices are cheaper". Some have "Be charged to 100% by this time" so they can pick and choose when to start charging.

Please don't let your lack of experience run away concocting scenarios which don't exist.

thelastgallon5• 3 years ago

Your assumption is there is no electricity at home or work, only at charging stations far away.

But, we have electricity anywhere we have a building. In fact, thats the first utility thats hooked up before anything is even built. Now, we can think of charging an EV anytime it is parked. Residential garages have a 240V dryer outlet (or in the laundry room next to garage). That outlet can be used or an additional outlet can be added.

Cars are parked 22 - 23 hours a day. They can charge anytime they are parked.

stephen_g4• 3 years ago

If you've chosen to go to a fast charger, you're always going to get a charge and you'll just pay what it costs. That's not going to change.

But for a destination charger (e.g. shopping center), or a charger at home or work, it doesn't have to be like that. I would have a system where there's three options (can be three big light up buttons) - 1. I need the battery charged right now, 2. I'd like the battery charged over the next 6 hours, and 3. I have enough charge for now, but do charge me up if it's free or prices are negative.

Option 2 would probably be the default, because it would be able to modulate the demand and charge very cheaply, because it'd mostly only have to avoid the two-hour or so peak periods (like the solar duck curve). Option 1 is there when you need it, but you might pay a few dollars more for a charge. During the day in summer, in areas with lots of solar (like my state in Australia) you might be able to always select Option 3, and usually get a full charge (well, I'd set the 80% limit but fully up to there) every time without ever paying anything.

It doesn't have to be hard - you just tell it you want charge right now, over the next little while, or you don't care, and you pay (or don't pay) a differently depending on what you select. It can be a very small number of super simple and extremely intuitive options, not complex settings you need to think about. People scare-monger about "Governments taking away our ability to use power when we want", but it's actually going to be "Utilities will offer incentives like free electricity if you choose to shift your usage" - just offering more options, not taking away freedoms.

breischl3• 3 years ago

This seems like a special case of the general concept that matching electricity demand to supply is important, and whereas a fossil fueled grid has enough dispatchable power sources to match supply to demand, a renewable-powered grid has to instead match demand to supply (at least to a much greater degree).

So it's interesting, although at some point it seems unnecessary to enumerate that this same concept applies to every possible source of electricity demand.

AtlasBarfed• 3 years ago

I get this is useful for a huge overload of wind or solar power, but this doesn't address base load and offpeak generation usage.

The headline reeks of oil/gas companies pushing an agenda to keep gas turbine a critical part of the baseload infrastructure and keep grid storage from developing.

gwbas1c4• 3 years ago

freshwater tanks are cheaper than electrical batteries, it seems appropriate to fully exploit the ability of tanks to displace energy production/consumption, and then, if needed, to use electrical batteries for the same purpose

What about the cost of additional desalination equipment needed to take advantage of energy peaks? In a situation like this, is extra desalination equipment needed when renewable energy peaks? Or, do current desalination systems have periods where the equipment is idle?

stephen_g4• 3 years ago

Should this kind of observation be especially surprising for anyone? There are some round-trip inefficiencies to any energy conversion and/or storage system, so using electricity directly if you can is always going to be better than storage - that doesn't mean storage is bad or less important, but it's a tool that we should try and reserve as much as possible for when it's really needed.

It's easy to demonstrate the same thing on a small scale - at my house with hot water heating for example, I run my electric (heat pump) storage hot water heater in the middle of the day, and it almost always runs 100% from solar power (sometimes with extremely cloudy or rainy weather it uses some grid power). I don't have a battery system yet, but I'm doing the sums - and if I relied on instantaneous electric hot water heating so was heating water on demand mostly outside solar hours, even before thinking about the lower round-trip efficiency I'd need a far bigger (and therefore much more expensive) battery system than I will now for the same hot water load.

If you're in an area that has less sunshine but more wind energy, the principle is basically the same, you just have to time it for when there's excess wind energy, but it just seems very obvious that if you can shift high energy use tasks to those times that's always going to be more effective than using batteries, and doing so makes the battery storage cheaper for the electricity use that you really need it for...

hedora• 3 years ago

I think you’ll find the kWh used by any water heater will be negligible, but that the peak kw of the on demand one would force you to buy giant batteries. We ended up getting a hybrid heat pump water heater. It is very efficient, but we have to wait for the water to warm up at the tap.

If it were easy to change, I’d probably put in a recirculating system that keeps the water hot in the pipes (not sure how much electricity that wastes though).

tlb• 3 years ago

The question is whether the round-trip inefficiency of storing energy is greater than the cost of having energy-consuming equipment that sits idle when the sun isn't shining and gets stopped and started frequently.

For example, aluminum production is famously energy-intensive, but I've read it's not good for the equipment to start and stop it frequently because the reaction happens in molten aluminum salts and it hurts the equipment when you stop and it solidifies.

And while Bitcoin is energy-intensive, it's also capital intensive for the chips so it's not cost-effective to run it only part-time.

Reverse osmosis may have a good combination of high energy:capital ratio (so it doesn't waste a lot of capital on idle equipment) and not requiring complex startup/shutdown sequences.

hitchstory• 3 years ago

In Germany they vary aluminium production rates in response to electricity supply (i.e. produce much less when it's less sunny and windy). They just dont turn it off completely, ever.

There's probably a lot more low hanging electricity demand shifting fruit like this.

pxeger1• 3 years ago

With dynamic electricity pricing, wouldn’t this just happen anyway by market forces?

ljlolel• 3 years ago

This is the same argument for bitcoin mining with excess energy!

ZeroGravitas• 3 years ago

The more general headline is probably "flexible demand"/"time-shifting" is cheaper than short term storage.

kilotaras• 3 years ago

An acquaintance of mine was looking into the general area of using cheap electricity. The pitch is "Instead of looking at storing energy efficiency, look at things that become profitable if energy is really cheap, but only for the fraction of the day". This demand in turn will drive building more generating capacity.

bequanna• 3 years ago

Hmm what options are there for this?

Pumping water, Bitcoin mining, what else?

pjfin123• 3 years ago

I think we should build giant desalination and water distillation plants in the American Southwest where there's a lot of sun for solar power. Then we can pump the water inland and reclaim enormous amounts of currently unusable land.

Hithredin• 3 years ago

This is just naturally solved by capitalism, no magic.

When electricity on the grid is cheaper, all intensive applications can run at that time. Just make the difference of price worth the pause of the industry when electricity is scarce.

Desalination can beat batteries for excess energy

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