Comment by westurner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by westurner | Hacker News Reader

Given the intraday prices, are there sufficient incentives to stimulate creation of energy storage businesses to sell the excess electricity back a couple hours or days later?

Or have the wasteful idiot cryptoasset miners been regulated out of existence such that there is no longer a buyer of last resort for excess rationally-subsidized clean energy?

Are the Duck Curve and Alligator curve problems the same in EU and other energy markets with and without intraday electricity prices?

Duck curve: Solar peaks around noon, but energy usage peaks around the evening commute and dinner; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve

Alligator curve: Wind peaks in the middle of the night;

https://fresh-energy.org/renewable-integration-in-the-midwes... :

> So, if we’re not duck-like, what is the Upper Midwest’s energy mascot? We give you: the Smilin’ Gator Curve. Unlike California’s ominous, faceless duck, Sally Gator welcomes the Midwest’s commitment to renewable generation!

(An excellent drawing of a cartoon municipally-bonded incumbent energy utility mascot!)

Can cryptoasset or data mining firms scale to increase demand for electricity when energy prices low or below zero? What are there relocation costs?

Is such a low subsidized energy price lucrative to energy storage, not-yet-PQ Proof-of-Work, and other data mining firms?

Can't GPE gravitational potential energy in old but secured mine shafts scale to meet energy storage requirements?

As far as I’m aware, at least what has been explained to me, storage is a smaller problem. The bigger problem is how do you transfer that energy from where it is stored to where it is needed. Wind farms in the sea help nothing in Bayern.

The answer is obvious, you synthesize hydrocarbons. It's your guess as to why this isn't done or hardly even talked about.

Sure. H2 is one of the storage methods. Been saying that for years. But when there’s a need surge in Bayern now and overproduction at the sea… that still doesn’t help you.

Because the resulting fuel isn't economically viable. You need to amortize equipment costs and round trip efficiency is really poor.

This is one of those obvious ideas, that sounds good on a first glance, but where it's totally non obvious, if it's really profitable in practice.

The maximum power you can take from the grid depends on the max. power of your electrolysers. But you only want to run the electrolysers, when they are profitable, that is when the electricity prices are low enough due to oversupply. On the other hand the whole equipment is probably expensive to buy and keep running, so you want to run them as long and often as possible. Additionally you may use energy storage to prolong the profitable time windows of your electrolysers.

That said, it would be really great, if hydrogen and/or hydrocarbons would be synthesised at scale. There are many pilot projects and I hope one finds the right tech and trade offs to make this profitable.

you don't synthesize them you securitize them

So, per your understanding, grid connectivity for energy production projects is a bigger issue than energy storage in their market?

Price falls below zero because there's a supply glut (and due to aggressive, excessive, or effective subsidies to accelerate our team transition to clean energy).

Is it the national or regional electricity prices that are falling below zero?

Is the price lower during certain hours of the day? If so, then energy storage could probably smooth that out.

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