The trouble with "use free electricity" schemes is that the capital cost never sleeps: you have built a fixed plant, on a piece of land, and paid for that, regardless of whether it runs or not. So there's usually a fairly high minimum duty cycle to make it economically viable.

You could make the argument in the other direction: the AI training datacenters could run for 23/24 hours, saving electricity at the peak time when it's most expensive and when they're pushing up the cost of electricity for everyone else the most .. but of course all those GPUs are too expensive to leave idle.

Indeed, the biggest constraint being I imagine the grid connection.

One thing I keep thinking is that with the grid being a network, there are certain key points in the network which would be extremely useful to have battery storage.

Overall the system may have peaks and troughs, however it is a network of edges, some my reach capacity for several hours a day, if battery storage could be built at these points, then the other edges could still be served.

Indeed some points may go up and down several times in a day, and a large enough battery to sate that demand could earn a lot.

I can't see the high level prices reflect the intricacies of a working network. It might be useful on the edges when power is brought in, but further in where use and demand are intertwined something more sophisticated would be needed.

I keep thinking there should be a good case for a simulator game so that people can understand how this really works. (Caveat the above is my chopped liver sliding down a wall version of it, I don't work in the industry and as a physics graduate I'm no doubt buoyed by an inherent arrogance of it being easier than it is.)

Normally if I have an idea, I find that someone has already done something already.

Are there any electricity network simulator games out there already?