Yeah I'm getting to that point where I'm willing to pay more to install solar, and a battery or two, just so I don't pay electrical providers as much each quarter.
this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2024
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We're also contemplating batteries because the amount you get paid to feed solar in isn't like for like with usage. 25c cost vs 3c feed in.
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Good for them! Theoretically that should attract industries that need a lot of electricity and everything balances out cost and demand wise.
So, bitcoin miners
Fuck bitcoin. It should be allocated to desalinisation so less water is pulled from the rivers of the driest continent on Earth. The ecology around waterways is already in the shitter, and global warming is going to 10x that clusterfuck.
That is a good option too. How long does it take to spool up or ramp down desalination? I mentioned Bitcoin mining because it's super fast to come online or go offline depending on the energy requirements at the moment.
Pretty fast, from my understanding, because you're pumping water through a membrane, and the pumps can be turned on and off quite fast.
The maintenance costs are also quite high though, from my understanding.
I doubt that would be terribly relevant. The lions share of the surplus energy should be predictable based on recent grid data + 24 hour weather forecasts.
Based on nothing but wikipedia the primary methods for desalination are distillation (boiling) and membrane; neither of which sound like ramp up time would matter.
Yeah, if time to come online and time to go offline doesn't matter, then that definitely works.
You wouldn't cover the cost of the miners if you had to shut turn them off and on like that. The worth of their hashing capabilities is nearly always declining as more and better miners come online.
But using the miners to do something else was always an interesting idea, like using them to heat a building. Maybe you could heat a swimming pool with them.
For home usage my thought would be use it as a hot water heater or a dryer for clothes or maybe even make a switchable 500 watt and 1500 watt version and use it as a space heater for those cold winter nights.
Ya, if you have a miner at home, it will reduce your heating bill. You just gotta find a good use for it when it's not cold outside, so something like supplementing your water heater as you mentioned would work ya.
I think there's merit in the idea. Someone makes an electric water heater purpose built for this and they build a miner card you can swap in/out as technology improves the the current one becomes obsolete. Uses the miner for primary heat, and when it's not enough uses regular electricity to make the heat.
See, that would be awesome as hell, because those appliances need heat. And so, mining with it basically subsidizes the heat that I would otherwise just be using anyway. It may not subsidize it completely, but any subsidy is better than no subsidy at all.
Steel, aluminium and battery production can also make good use of lots of cheap renewable energy.
Or things like aluminium smelting/electrolysis.
On crypto, if it's green energy and there is enough of it, what's wrong? (It's not great, and a waste of hardware, but not as awful)
It's a waste of hardware, and a waste of energy that could be doing something useful.
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How about investing in grid energy storage, to cope with intermittent production?
They are. Modeling has shown that getting Australia to 98.8% renewable is highly achievable.
https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/energy/grid-renewable-electricity-simulation/
Austrailia is one of the best places in the world to do that, but it should be pointed out that the article you linked wants 120GWh of batteries (costing ~12 billion USD at current Li-ion prices) as well as building more than 38GW of wind power and 30GW of solar power in order to meet ~25GW of average demand and that still needs pumped hydro on top and more than 9GW of fossil fuel power to make up the gaps.
It's just about feasible in Australia with excess sun and wind, plenty of empy space, low population density and terrain amenable to hydro storage. But it isnt realy generalisable to most other places.
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It is possible that new battery chemistries or compressed air storage may prove cheap enough to use for long term storage.
There are plenty of options to choose from, but only few are actually industrial grade at the moment. So many promising ones are still in pilot stage, and I’m really looking forward to seeing which ones actually prove to be viable.
Traditional lithium based batteries clearly aren’t it, but LFP looks ok though.
The salt batteries will be even cheaper than lfp, they just take even more space, but we got lots of space to put batteries.
Exactly. Grid energy storage doesn’t have to be light or small. It’s not going anywhere, and you can build such facilities in remote locations.
Who cares if it weighs as much as a factory and takes the same space. You could go with molten calcium, redox flow batteries or even wilder technologies.
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