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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

Overloading the grid isn't a good idea, generally speaking

If the grid were smarter it could schedule demand for the excessive production times. It could be used, for example, in render farms or other non-time-critical high load batch operations.

Some places have flexible pricing, where electricity costs more at certain times, which allows users of electricity to do this. I don't think it should be the grids responsability to do that kind of scheduling. It would be nice if everywhere we had some kind of hourly pricing adjustment that would fluxuate within some predefined price range, then you could hook into the grids api to determine when to run your appliances.

Some kind of real time pricing api would do wonders. I wonder how we would solve the issue of having a bunch of devices waiting for the price to drop under $x and as soon as it does all of these scheduled devices kick in to action causing the price to immediately shoot up. Probably need some way to distribute price cheap times so not everyone gets it at the same hour.

Something similar already happens with natural gas in manufacturing. You can either sign a contract to lock in a rate, or pay as the price changes. If you are a factory that makes a good that you can stockpile (like sand), it makes sense to run more in cheaper parts of the year.

(Same thing also happens with iron / steel. I would assume electricity is the same, but I don’t have much knowledge. )

At a wholesale there is flexible pricing. The grid has to do that sort of scheduling because if more power is put into the network then is consumed then systems get damaged.

This is also why the turbine based systems that coal and hydro systems are so important to the stability of the grid. The physical momentum of the spinning metal stores considerable energy and can smooth over short lived inbalences in power consumption.

They perform that role right now, but you could replace them with much much cheaper flywheels.

That's exactly what this is, but at the wholesale level. The price is so flexible that it sometimes goes negative.

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