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Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid. (climate.benjames.io)

submitted 2 months ago by poVoq@slrpnk.net to c/energy@slrpnk.net

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[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech 30 points 2 months ago (12 children)

There is a lot of operations that aren't timing-critical (their work is cumulative) and can be made cheaper by only using excess energy in daytime.

Pumped hydro
Charging grid-tied batteries and EVs
Air heating/conditioning (especially when used with physical heat storage)
Water heating/cooling for residential use
Water heating for pools
Reverse osmosis
Furnaces in glass/metal/aluminum factories, crematoriums etc.
Computation-heavy tasks (AI training, simulations, rendering, crypto mining...)

Solar can be built wherever there's demand for any of these, right? Also, more customers should adopt a real-time energy pricing model.

[–] general_kitten@sopuli.xyz 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Factories often kinda have to run 24/7 so only firing up the furnaces/other electricity intensive machines when electricity is cheap isn't feasible in most cases

[–] ChaoticNeutralCzech 5 points 2 months ago

I'm not saying factories should be forced to switch machinery like with ripple control systems in Soviet countries (contactors in households and industry switching based on signals superimposed on the 50Hz grid), there should just be an appropriate economic incentive in doing so. If it's not enough to offset equipment cost, the factories can ignore it.

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