It’s still not earning you money to spend electricity because you still have to pay the transfer fee which is around 6 cents / kWh but it’s pretty damn cheap nevertheless, mostly because of the excess in wind energy.

Last winter because of a mistake it dropped down to negative 50 cents / kWh for few hours, averaging negative 20 cents for the entire day. People were literally earning money by spending electricity. Some were running electric heaters outside in the middle of the winter.

  • @Thadrax
    1•1 month ago

    Thermal storage needs to be quite large though, at least with the stone/brick like mass they used back then. And you need to isolate it, otherwise you have no control over the release of that stored heat. I wonder if new materials, maybe something that undergoes phase change in that temperature range, could be a lot more space efficient.

    • @AA5B
      1•1 month ago

      It doesn’t have to be large, or the size is related to the use case. In the house I grew up, they were similar size and shape to standard radiators and worked well through cold winters in upstate NY

      Consider a single radiator in a house. You only need storage sufficient to use that radiator for one day. And it doesn’t matter too much if it can’t cover extreme temperatures, as long as it is sufficient to cover peak prices most of the time

      I finally found one. Why aren’t there choices like

      https://stash.energy/en/