> 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.