California produces about half of its electricity from renewables, mostly solar.

We’re decades away from 100%, but how long away are we nationally from 50%, 65%, 90%, 99%?

As solar production ramps up to higher percentages there is going to be more and more peak power in excess of demand. Industrial scale electrochemistry is going to be one of the alternatives to batteries that’s going to be developed.

Already nitrogen fixation requires a huge amount of energy, this process at scale could very well require less energy than the modern haber process.

What factory that produces X is so cheap to build in relation to the cost of energy on a daily basis that it is worth producing less X at different times of day due to the price of energy? The cost of the energy is usually such a small component of total costs it is not worth altering behavior for daily small energy price fluctuations, and nobody is advocating for energy prices to change by 10x throughout the day.

Aluminum

Do aluminum factories shut down daily due to fluctuating prices or are they located in areas with cheap and plentiful reliable electricity supply?

Sometimes they’re built next to hydroelectric dams and use the entire power output of the dam. Usually with long term power contracts that are more about constant load than consuming excess peaks (having a larger base load is more of an old school energy efficiency benefit, having users for variable loads is the future)

They don’t shut down entirely because the aluminum has to stay molten at a thousand degrees, but they can scale the energy usage significantly, this is becoming more of an interest in the last decade.

https://www.greentechmedia.com/amp/article/german-firm-turns...

Before markets figured out how to take advantage, there have been several situations where electricity prices were regularly negative… they would pay for you to consume energy.

When solar hits a certain ratio of production there will be a daily peak where electricity will be very cheap because there’s too much of it, regardless of what people “advocate”.

Electrochemistry things are where it’s at, metal refining specifically.

Aluminum production from ore has one step where you literally just make what is effectively an enormous battery out of aluminum ore and “charge” it, when it’s fully charged you’ve turned aluminum oxide into pure aluminum. It can even be run backwards to produce electricity because it’s literally a battery (a really shitty one). So there’s not a huge capital investment or complex process and electric input is actually a significant portion of the cost.

Other simple electrochemistry things that do have a major portion of the cost in electricity can do the same when costs get low enough. There’s a lot of recycling that becomes possible with cheap clean energy that you would never do with fossil fuel electricity.

We are decades away from needing this. But we need to generate ammonia without fossil fuels for fertilizer and feed stock.

Also, we need a fuel for long distance transport like ships when batteries won’t work. Ammonia will always be cheaper than synthetic fuel because no carbon doesn’t have to come from air, and it stores better than hydrogen.

There may be lots of surplus electricity in the future but there will also be a lot of demands for carbon capture, hydrogen, long term storage, and chemical processes.

At current costs, a price-optimal solar/wind/battery mix for handling existing electricity needs would have on the order of 400% overcapacity. All that extra electricity is what will power the hydrogen-generation.

The main challenge is building cheap electrolysers without so much regard to efficiency, in order to use all the power when available. Most commercially available electrolysers today are expensive and cannot ramp up and down quickly.