That depends on how often you can use the equipment. The company I work with pours cast iron in one factory - if you get a job there you work the overnight shift because that is when power is cheap. Since energy is the main cost of melting iron (it takes a lot of energy to get to get over 1100c) we are willing to let the equipment be idle and pay the workers extra to work a shift that doesn't work with the rest of the world.

Planned maintenance in that factory is worked with the power company. I'm not sure if that means they are also doing maintenance on some power plant, or if that means during Christmas lights season.

If you can predict high wind times a week in advance I'll work my energy hungry production around your cheap energy prices. The only thing I need is some sort of guarantee that those times will happen "often enough". I can pay employees to work 60 hour weeks some months, and other months get paid vacation, so long as over a full year I get reasonable use of my factory and there is some prediction.

I forsee periods of negative/cheap/free electricity becoming much more common. If your equipment is not used on average two days a week, the economics start to look a LOT more sensible even for more capital intensive, energy intensive applications.

At the moment pretty much every MWh generated is a substituted MWh not generated by gas and periods of negative pricing are still relatively rare.

Wind is so cheap though, that at some point, overproduction will become the norm rather than exceptional and being able to timeshift your usage could, unexpectedly, end up saving you more money than reducing your usage.

The counterintuitiveness of this and the fact that this is new territory is why I think that there's lots of profit potential.

Lots of things that we currently do were designed on the basis that power supply and demand were predictable and slowly-changing. Now we will see technologies evolve on the basis that unpredictable power supply is very cheap and predictable power supply can be quite expensive. That's fine.

With negative electricity rates you can do crazy things like buy thousands of space heaters, and just heat the outside.

Space heaters don’t become obsolete, and they’re not very capital intensive, or require much maintenance. You just need space to put them in.

> You just need space to put them in.

What are you talking about? Just take the three phases from your power outlet and stick them in the ground, with some distance between them. There, zero capital costs, and a nice, mostly resistive load for the power plant. A bad time to be an earthworm, though.

Yeah, last time that (accidentally, effectively) happened just down the road from here, it caused some rather interesting smells, and that was just a 300A feed (or rather, it blew a 300A fuse - repeatedly - the technician kept just replacing the fuse a few times until I wandered over and told him about the smelly bit of pavement).

> the technician kept just replacing the fuse a few times

What the fuck?!

That admittedly was kind of my thought at the time. As he explained to me, often the underground cable will short out due to water ingress (it had rained a lot in the previous few hours), and pumping 300+A through that water could often drive the water off, and resolve the short.

It took a bit of persuading to get him to believe me about the smell of burning plastic and suspiciously dry area of pavement just down the road. Once he believed me, a crew came in, dug the thing up, replaced a section of cable, and relaid tarmac, in a surprisingly short time.

Alternatively, maybe in an era of climate change, there could be an incentive to use the extra to run processes like carbon capture. If carbon credits became a thing in a global economy, I could see some companies in a cap-and-trade scenario use that as a convenient way to offset their total footprint.

You can buy a 10MW load bank on alibaba for $40k

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/11KV-10MW-Load-Bank-f...

Sometimes power plants have GW size load banks, it's an acre or so of steel wires strung up on poles. All the wires glow red hot when in use. It is quite a sight.

I'd assume their are tradeoffs between capital costs, maintenance costs, and efficiency. If electricity prices are really going negative you can funge against efficiency hard and still come out ahead.

Bitcoin is "special" because you've got hardware that will pay for itself in 2 years and be obsolete in 4 years. So if you've got it turned off 50% of the time, you're losing money.

But if you're in a different industry, with equipment that takes a longer to become obsolete or wears out before it becomes obsolete, lower utilisation might be fine. Plenty of capital equipment spends loads of time idle.

> But it's not necessarily going to be very profitable.

Not paying for electricity is profitable by default.. Having a reserve for the long term that's environmentally friendly, its a benefit.. Investing in infrastructure that doesn't depend on finite fossil fuels is profitable.. So I have no idea what you're talking about.

> For the same reason, it's not a good idea to have bitcoin mining equipment sitting around waiting for cheap electricity. The hardware becomes obsolete very quickly, so there's only limited time to earn back the investment.

Its really nothing like that at all..

> So I have no idea what you're talking about.

Then you should also read the sentence directly after the one you quoted, in which it's explained:

> > The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs.

> The equipment that sits around waiting for low or negative electricity prices represents locked up capital, and ongoing maintenance and depreciation costs

But the costs over time are negligible when current alternatives will eventually only go up due to scarcity. I might be missing something.

> But the costs over time are negligible [...]

In heavy industry, they're very much not. Large machines often cost large amounts of money. You don't want large machines sitting around doing nothing when they could do useful work and earn money instead – so that you can, for example, pay off the loans you took out for them, or pay the operational staff that pulls the levers and turns the switches.