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If you really want to turn everyone who runs a facility that needs power for under $10/kWh into an energy trader who has to build a facility with a larger generator than needed and a battery bank and everything else, there is a huge amount of economic loss involved in that. Energy is cheap. Energy should be cheap. That infrastructure should remain for disasters.

Running those generators is not free, and puts wear on them. Also, starting up those generators takes time and puts a certain amount of wear on them, so you are now talking about also having batteries and other equipment to cover short periods and the gap during generator startup. And now when do you spin up the generator? Do you spin it up when the instantaneous price of a kWh goes over a certain threshold or do you wait? All of these are now things that every single industrial facility has to think about.

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quickthrowman 3 months ago | parent [-]

In my post I was explicitly referring to backup generators being basically mandatory at a refrigerated pharmaceutical storage warehouse, not making a general argument that every industrial building should have backup generators. Generators are common at data centers, hospitals, emergency dispatch call centers, and refrigerated storage facilities.

There was no need to take a specific point I was making about refrigerated storage facilities and pretend I was talking about commercial and industrial sites in general. Please read more closely next time and respond to my actual argument instead of the argument you imagined that I made.

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pclmulqdq 3 months ago | parent [-]

My point is that running those things is not free or cheap, and that with floating energy prices, you now have to make them significantly beefier and make economic decisions about when to run them. You will also have many more of these generators show up. People adapt their behavior to the incentives you give them, and the design of generators is also very much more subtle than you are giving credit for.

So yes, while it seems like people already have infrastructure for floating energy rates, in reality they do not.

	▲	quickthrowman 3 months ago \| parent [-]
		Again, I am not saying that facilities should use backup generators to make power if it spot price goes slightly above what it costs to run the generators. Read the original post I was responding to, all of my posts in this discussion are operating under the assumption that electricity is $200/kWh. Let’s say you’re running a 250 HP compressor to keep your cold storage warehouse cold, that would draw around 200kW. One hour of operating that would be $40,000 if electricity was $200/kWh. It costs much much less than $40,000/hr to operate a 250kW generator, you can buy a 250kW diesel one with an automatic transfer switch for around $100k from Cat or Cummins. I’m not replying if you respond again, you’re responding to straw men instead of my actual arguments. I sell and run commercial electrical work, including generator installs and replacements, I know everything you’re telling me already.