If we build out our GHG-free power capacity beyond our electricity demand, efficiency isn’t an issue. We need fresh water. We need hydrogen and oxygen. I’m sure there are other convenient things to produce whenever electricity demand falls off. These energy storage and reselling schemes are just destroying value.

There’s no IRL data for the specific model I’ve described, but I’m not sure what you mean by “feelings based”. Using otherwise excess energy instead of storing it is a considered, rational strategy.

Can prob dig a whole system the same as they did to get all the materials for this mess.

The water would also not be useless like all the water used to process the battery materials.

AI and Bitcoin miners can be a part of the solution rather than the problem.

There are disincentives to overbuilding solar, wind, tidal, wave, and other passive energy collectors. If we overbuild, the lower output from suboptimal production is still enough to meet demand. But, under normal conditions we will have far more power than we can use.

We already have periods of time where power prices go negative: generators are forced to pay to dump excess power. This melts the return on their investment, and stifles further rollout.

We can justify overbuilding such sources if we can adjust our demand to meet whatever we can supply. That means turning on additional loads when the sun shines, and turning off loads when the wind stops blowing.

Data centers can be put on highly variable rate plans that are at or even below costs during ideal generation conditions, and wildly expensive during suboptimal generation conditions. Data centers on such plans will halt processing when power is overly expensive, and only draw on the grid when it is profitable to do so.

Data centers aren’t the only industry where this can be done, and this isn’t a novel concept. Steel mills operate overnight to increase the load on baseload generation like nuclear. Baseload generators need the daily demand “trough” as high as possible, and the “peak” as low as possible. They need the curve as flat as possible, so they offer incentives to heavy industrial consumers to shift their demand. As we continue to shift to passive collectors instead of traditional generation, we need to reverse these old demand shaping practices to match the capabilities of new generation methods.

We need an authoritarian figure to nationalize the energy supply, shut down these wasteful expressions of late stage capitalism, mandate rooftop solar, and build out our nuclear fleet.

We lack the materials and engineering necessary to make lifted weight storage systems enter the order of magnitude of energy storage needed to compete with batteries, let alone pumped hydro. It’s just really, really hard to compete with literal megatons of water pumped up a 500 meter slope.

I believe that the plant in question was using something besides Lithium Iron Phosphate batteries. This press release mentions LG JH4 which are deffo not LiFePO4. LiFePO4 batteries are far, far safer than other Lithium chemistries, and are now the norm for BESS (not cars tho, since they have lower energy density but better a better lifetime than NMC/NCA). This fire would not have happened with a BESS using LiFePO4 batteries.

Now that batteries with aqueous sodium-ion chemistries are becoming available, we should begin transitioning pre-LiFePO4 sites to those wholesale. Aqueous sodium-ion batteries should be even safer than LiFePO4, and while they have kinda shit energy density, they’re still fine for grid storage.

EDIT: correction, LiFePO4 batteries can run away, but they are incapable of autoignition.

And power is a measure of energy over time.