alt Hacker NewsWe fools here in Germany sometimes _pay_ to get rid of excess electricity when it's very sunny and windy. How about having some rock crushing machines that instead use that cheap electricity to make more sand?
Thanks for the puns, too.
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It's quite likely that the cost of idle capital is much higher than the cost of paying others to accept electricity. Depending on the price swings, a battery may be a much better investment.
I hate to say this, but why aren't the Bitcoin miners jumping all over that?
Free power doesn’t mean free production.
There’s also labor, wear on the machines and the lost opportunity of using your money to do something else. Building such crushing machines and only use them x% of the time (for, for now, fairly small values of x) may not be a good investment.
Time to setup some gravitational batteries to exploit that opportunity.
One of the proposals for exploiting zero (or negative) electricity prices is storage of the heat at high temperature in refractory solids. This would be used by people who normally burn a fuel for the heat. Instead, they can preheat air and reduce the fuel needed (perhaps reduced to zero).
Firebrick works up to about 1000 C. A spinoff from MIT is using special nickel-doped chromium oxide (chromia) bricks, which can work up to 1800 C, about the temperature of a natural gas-air flame. These bricks are electrically conductive and can act as their own heating elements.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91129126/these-bricks-conduct-el...
https://electrifiedthermal.com/
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/130800