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0 pointsjonfw3y ago0 comments

If we expect industry to take up the excess, than either 1. that industry will only operate according to the weather or 2. We'll still need some variable power generation that can be switched on when wind or solar isn't producing enough

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Symbiote3y ago

A few industrial users can weather changes in supply, with notice of the expected price in advance.

The aluminium smelter can heat to x+250°, let things cool to x° while people cook their evening meal, then heat up again afterwards.

A large supermarket chain can set their refrigerators to 5°, but by allowing the range to move between 3° and 7° can save significant power. (One of the big British supermarkets already does this.)

makomk3y ago

That only works on short timescales, which isn't the main problem because there are so many ways of solving that (for example batteries or thermal storage for home heating).

Symbiote3y ago

The large, industrial users are an example of thermal storage, but at a different scale than home heating.

Tesco's fridges are apparently worth about 25-50MW, so like a small grid-scale battery: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/23/cool-runnin...

An aluminium smelter is gigawatts, the one in Scotland is 1.2GW, which is a medium-size power plant by itself.

They're easy projects, compared to installing thousands or hundreds of thousands of batteries or new heating systems in homes.

bluGill3y ago

If they have notice the smelter will be happy to shutdown for maintenance for a few months. You need to plan this with them a year in advance though.

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coffeebeqn3y ago

You don’t really get any more Solar after dinner. If everyone gets a big battery (expensive) then they could slowly offload the charge overnight but that would need to make financial sense to the house owners somehow.

At a minimum you’d need to recuperate the wear on the battery as they all have a finite amount of cycles

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Symbiote3y ago

A few industrial users can weather changes in supply, with notice of the expected price in advance.

The aluminium smelter can heat to x+250°, let things cool to x° while people cook their evening meal, then heat up again afterwards.

makomk3y ago

That only works on short timescales, which isn't the main problem because there are so many ways of solving that (for example batteries or thermal storage for home heating).

Symbiote3y ago

The large, industrial users are an example of thermal storage, but at a different scale than home heating.

Tesco's fridges are apparently worth about 25-50MW, so like a small grid-scale battery: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jun/23/cool-runnin...

An aluminium smelter is gigawatts, the one in Scotland is 1.2GW, which is a medium-size power plant by itself.

They're easy projects, compared to installing thousands or hundreds of thousands of batteries or new heating systems in homes.

bluGill3y ago

If they have notice the smelter will be happy to shutdown for maintenance for a few months. You need to plan this with them a year in advance though.

1 more reply

coffeebeqn3y ago

At a minimum you’d need to recuperate the wear on the battery as they all have a finite amount of cycles

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse