No, because his situation is basically that the gravity battery is already sitting at its max height.
He's just trying to burn energy because a negative rate means he's getting paid to use it.
So sure - it's great to give that energy a functional use first (ex - charge his batteries) but eventually he runs out of functional ways to use the energy but could still be making money by using it.
Pumped hydro could do that if they had a way to bypass (either physically or electrically) their turbines on the downhill portion of the loop. Just pump water up and back down without extracting the energy. Then you have a dummy load that isn't just a power sink and is already designed to handle the relatively rapid switches on and off.
Yeah, but dummy loads are cheap. Probably cheaper than changing any designs in other places.
It's straight forward to add a giant resistive load that just converts electricity back to heat.
I can get 10kw heaters for just a couple hundred bucks or 1.5kw heaters for literally $20 usd. And that also switches on/off easily.
For hydro... just boiling water with a heater is going to be pretty much unbeatable if we're playing the "waste energy" game. No need to approximate it slowly with your pump motor and risk other infrastructure.
The idea was to have dual use so that they're not obsoleted when we get around to installing sufficient power storage for renewables and also a less heat intensive way to do it too.
The power is coming from energy that's otherwise going to heat the planet regardless (solar rays).
If you really wanted to be clever, your best bet would probably be to turn it into a laser beam and send it back to space. Would mimic that energy getting reflected instead of absorbed, albeit through a pretty inefficient and convoluted process.
Might make more sense to run carbon capture devices at that point, but again - in either of these cases we're back into the "it's getting pretty expensive to waste this energy" spot.
Yes of course. My idea was a way for existing facilities to also function in this capacity so you didn't wind up with facilities reliant only on negative prices. I think that's important because those prices are a bandaid on the real problem that would be solved by sufficient power storage.
You can build this at a small scale pretty cheaply but the connection to sink meaningful amounts of power would quickly become a significant part of the expense.
