Smart air-condition and cooling is also a possibility, a here Finland we have started to piloting programs where heating is smart so houses are heated more when electricity prices are low.

That reminds me of the so called "Niedertarif-Speicherheizung" (storage heater) that were installed until the 80s here in Germany. They used the comparatively cheaper energy during the nighttime to heat up and then emit the heat during the day. They were controlled by the energy provider to turn on when the energy price was low.

An answer that no-one seems to have thought of is a liberalized energy market where non physical traders are allowed, and allowed to deliberately take themselves to imbalance.

To be clear: this is literally what the US has. I suspect @ourlordcaffeine knows this, but for anyone else reading it.

UK as well

Even the giant crypto farm is a type of energy storage - as long as you can afterwards sell coins to buy electricity.

Long distance power transmission can face losses of around 10% per mile.

But if you turn power into coins at point A, then use coins to buy power at point B, maybe you have transmission losses that don't scale with distance?

Yeah I had thought surely they can find a use for free electricity rather than just turning it off

They should accelerate a particle with it.

EDIT: Whip it around in circles with giant electromagnets.

Free electricity that turns off half the time and run basically randomly for the other half? Without a battery it’s useless, and you have to pay for that battery. Treating the electric grid as a battery shouldn’t be free. It’s just in this case they found the cost of battery to be greater than the value of the electricity they’re creating.

This island uses water as a battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG4Q4kXal_U , when there's a lot of wind spinning the wind turbines, they pump up water up a mountain, and when it's less windy they let the water fall through a hydroelectric plant...

> Free electricity that turns off half the time and run basically randomly for the other half? Without a battery it’s useless

I can't imagine that's true. Spot instances come to mind.

I keep coming back to electrowinning iron. When I search for papers it looks like people have started working on it again in the last ten years. I think it's not particularly high tech. Intermittent tolerant and scalable.

In SA there are some pump-hydro storage projects in the pipeline which should smooth out some of these variations.

Good stuff. I was wondering if maybe a desalination plant could work..

Adelaide has a desal plant. It was even in the news today: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-07/how-will-the-sa-desal...

How? Or was that meant ironically?

Desalination plants use a lot of power, but it's not obvious to me how to use it to store power.

The idea there isn't that you store power but rather that you only run the plant when power is cheap (and then keep a large enough fresh water reservoir to serve demand until the next cheap electricity arrives). Demand management rather than supply management, effectively.

Yeah, the problem is that it's not easy to store very large amounts of water (at least not near where the Adelaide Desalination plant is).

I believe they can pump the water up into the hill, so I guess it's not entirely out of the question.

Decal plant when the power is cheap and well water the rest of the time?