Ask HN: Ideas for useful uses of excess electricity?
Ideally the extra energy would be used to help reduce environmental impact rather than making money, so crypto mining (for example) is not an option.
Here are some of my thoughts:
- heat water for home usage (heat pump); this solution is already deployed, but there is only so much hot water one needs - charge an EV; I don't own one presently, but it an option for the future - fight the current 70% rule in Germany (this is the cause of my excess, see below) - generate H2 via electrolysis; not sure what to do with H2 then. What would be interesting would be to be able to "charge" fuel cells and store them for use in winter, or compress H2 into cylinders? Not sure what can fit into my garage / would be affordable. - pumped water storage; I suspect the energies involved at home are insignificant vs industrial hydro solutions - convert to microwave and beam into space - run an industrial press to compress my lawn cuttings / garden waste into pellets and dump them into a deep lake - a magical machine that extracts Co2 from the air and produces a fine black powder which I could compress and dump into a deep lake - ...
Some background:
In Germany, excess domestic solar panel production can be pushed into the grid for a small (cash) refund, but there is a strange rule : only 70% of the maximum panel output is allowed to be pushed. So if the panels could generate 10kW at midday, without anything turned on at home, a maximum of 7kW can be pushed. This effect is only for a few "peak sun" hours (say 12pm to 3pm), but means that roughly 10kW hours of electricity is "lost" (the system is throttled back via the charge controller, so the energy isn't lost or wasted, it just isn't produced)