Aluminum Foundries in particular are extremely power intensive and have been run during off-peak times (or are built in areas with cheap plentiful electricity like nearby hydro-electric dams).
Still, i'd love to see this concept made a lot easier for the average consumer. Many people already have smart thermostats, why can't that talk to my power generation company and allow me to over heat/cool when the impact is lowest? Why can't my dish washer run automatically when it would impact the world the least? Why can't my EV automatically charge when power is most available?
I know most of those things are possible, but they sure as hell aren't easy, and IMO they won't truly have an impact until they're on by default and don't require the user to do much of anything.
These things seem like they are easily doable, but we just need the different industries to work together to come up with ways to have all of this stuff interoperate.
Fun fact: this is a big reason why aerospace congregated in the pacific northwest during WWII (eg Boeing in Seattle).
Aluminum is key to aircraft because it's lightweight, and at the turn of the century the US went on a dam-building spree with a lot of hydro (ie large consistent baseload) being located in the pacific northwest.
Geothermal energy is mostly for district heating and hot water
That's the great thing about standards -- there are so many to choose from!
If the load responding to increased renewable generation exceeded the generation then the excess load should have just run whenever it was convenient since it isn’t using renewable power anyway.
I’ve omitted nuclear and large hydro from my discussion even though their fuel doesn’t emit carbon.
If you're a large consumer of energy and can turn that consumption on or off at short notice (on the order of seconds) then the grid operator will pay you to allow them to scale your consumption up or down.
The classic example of this is cold storage. If you have a warehouse full of freezers which need to be kept within a certain temperature threshold then it doesn't really matter when you run the freezers and you could switch off at several points during the day.
Given how much electricity a datacenter consumes. Google surely must have a direct support contact within the electricity provider and they better start working both ways, if they don't already.
Quick math. A datacenter is 60 000 servers, so 6 MW consumption at 100 W per server (moderate load). That is 1% of the peak output of a nuclear reactor. You bet the electric company wants to know when they need to adjust their reactors.
Seems like getting rid of the middleman at a basic, physical level. Power is available for very low cost at certain times. So let's time-shift computation that doesn't have to be done at a specific time! Really, it's just the same trick as time-shifting your EV charging and other power draws. It costs money to run battery banks and inverters. Let's just take them out of the process, where we can.
"The best part is no part." -- Elon Musk
Regardless of this change, I wonder if they share their forecasted non-renewable energy needs with their energy supplier so that the energy supplier can prepare for changes to the expected base load.
Do any factories or other energy intensive operations do this?