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Finnish City Inaugurates 1 MW/100 MWh Sand Battery

(cleantechnica.com)
190 points erwinmatijsen | 1 comments | 03 Sep 25 06:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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kitd ◴[03 Sep 25 07:09 UTC] No.45113060[source]▶
I like these technologies. They may not be as energy efficient as using more exotic materials, but what they do use is simple, cheap and often sourced locally. Such economic factors are often as important to the ROI as the purely scientific ones.
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looofooo0 ◴[03 Sep 25 08:53 UTC] No.45113595[source]▶
I think with enough renewable in the grid, there will always be times when the costs are 0 or negative, so you can help stabilize the grid by consuming.
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yurishimo ◴[03 Sep 25 09:53 UTC] No.45113964[source]▶
Are there downsides to "just" sending all of the extra energy to ground? I've often wondered why overpowering the grid has been talked about as this huge unsolvable problem.

I understand it's wasteful, of course, but waste in a ecosystem of vast abundance seems like a feature, not a bug.

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1. ZeroGravitas ◴[03 Sep 25 10:34 UTC] No.45114174[source]▶
Solar and wind can be trivially turned down when not required. They are much, much better at it than traditional sources.

So easy that one of the actual problems we face is that by default grids will generally prefer to turn off the clean renewables and let the difficult to modulate fossil fuels run.

This is why negative prices are a good thing, financially incentivizing fossil producers to plan for flexibility and fining them when they fail to do so.