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derriz 4 days ago

Not really - renewable curtailment and negative wholesale electricity prices happen but not frequently enough that you can generally afford to leave a capital intensive investment like a bitcoin mining setup, a water desalination plant or a hydrogen electrolyser idle 90% of the time waiting for cheap electricity.

And the market and technological developments (batteries) are actively working against this pricing anomaly - I can see the phenomena of negative pricing disappear completely in electricity markets in the next few years given the current explosion in grid battery deployment.

littlecranky67 4 days ago | parent [-]

Might be true in the US, but here in Europe we see this quite often. Prices don't have to be negative, it is enough if they are cheap (we pay for water too). And in some locations there are already projects like this [0] where they built a hydro-electric pump station with a dam for storage plus a desalination plant that fills the reservoir from seawater in one location.

[0]: https://www.ree.es/en/ecological-transition/storage