I’m generally looking for more industrial uses, or ones that can generate some revenue while not being crazy overhead. Farm related uses would best, and I have done a deep dive into fertilizer production which could be viable. And where I live, crushed aggregate is often used as a base for new greenhouse or shade house installs.
Basically, I already have a potential agrovoltaics solution that I can do with the shade, which infact requires significant shade, but where it’s cheap enough to build this kind of system, there ain’t a huge amount of grid infrastructure, so it would be better to use the power in place. I was thinking rock crushers/ aggregate production because it’s something that depending on if the project is grid connected or not and depending on what the power company is willing to pay, could create aggregate or sell the power directly.
I really don’t want to support crypto but unfortunately, as a plug and pay solution, it’s a pretty easy and direct one.
Other ideas we’ve tossed around are refrigeration and food preservation, but the problem with those is that they need the power when they need the power, and so it’s not exactly a way to sink excess supply.
It’s tough because the overhead demands of any additional power sink almost always require 24 hours operation. Basically, the cost of a system to do “something” with your extra power is almost always such that you should probably just be running it 24/7.
Still open to more ideas but it will need to be able to pay for itself for me to get people on board.
Other ideas we’ve tossed around are refrigeration and food preservation, but the problem with those is that they need the power when they need the power, and so it’s not exactly a way to sink excess supply.
It can still be a useful sink at small scales. You could make ice at those times of day if you’re eventually going to need that ice later. It takes a lot more energy to chill something (especially water with its high specific heat and latent heat of fusion) that it takes to hold something at temperature in an insulated space. And then go on and use the ice later so that the need to chill something doesn’t have to be synchronized with the exact moment in time you’re drawing energy from the grid to run a refrigeration compressor.
Same with heating. Some smart water heaters can store thermal energy for later, too, and top off their energy usage for some times of day.
I’m not sure if the scale you’re imagining makes these ideas too small to be worth pursuing.
There is no meaningful way I can do something with hydrogen outside of as a feedstock into another process.
Things I’ve considered that would help me, running a gravel crusher, or if there was some scaled down hauber Bausch machine. I use a significant amount of gravel and I am always in need of fertilizer.
I know on a small garden scale, clover is a very good companion plant because it affixes nitrogen to the soil. It also acts as a ground cover to reduce moisture loss and suppress weeds, and on top of all of that it attracts bees.
You can run an ICE on hydrogen, with some minor modifications. If you have enough space you can store the produced hydrogen at near atmospheric pressure in a gas holder/gasometer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder
Yeah I’ve seen the plasma arc thing. I’m vaguely associated with some in the agrovoltaics research community and have considered reaching out. It’s not available to retail consumers yet
I’ve been pondering about this because and feel the need. I don’t have any solar, but I’d like to play around with local AI a bit. I don’t even have the hardware at the moment because driver support isn’t ready on my laptop.
I’d even like to try a coding agent to find out if there are any useful cases. I don’t want to do it in the cloud though. So I thought it’d be cool if someone with cheap or excess electricity could provide their hardware. I think it’s quite a challenge to do that, though.
Right now I’m thinking, maybe running a decentralized Libre Translate service or something similar could be a nice project. Mastodon uses this for post translation and self hosted instances could use it as a translation service. Somewhere, the sun is always shining on someone’s roof with solar, cheap energy and a spare GPU, I assume. I don’t think it makes a difference if a post is being translated in Australia when I browse my timeline at night in Germany.
Peer Tube video encoding could also be done like this.
If anyone has links to ideas about decentralized data centers or whatever that would be, I’d be very interested. I think it would also help with protest against data centers being built, because it’s nice to be able to have examples for alternatives. A way of using what’s already there without building a grid only big tech and the fossil fuel industry need.
Without relying on the internet, people could offer to back up BluRays for friends or the community. Or optimize the hell out of HomeAssistant to run Jellyfin tasks and stuff when there’s lots of solar.
I truly want to find someone I can do at the home scale with electricity, which isn’t buttcoin, to take advantage of overproduction.
It may not be a direct benefit to you, but if you have some spare compute, you could donate the compute to a project with BOINC.
I’m generally looking for more industrial uses, or ones that can generate some revenue while not being crazy overhead. Farm related uses would best, and I have done a deep dive into fertilizer production which could be viable. And where I live, crushed aggregate is often used as a base for new greenhouse or shade house installs.
Basically, I already have a potential agrovoltaics solution that I can do with the shade, which infact requires significant shade, but where it’s cheap enough to build this kind of system, there ain’t a huge amount of grid infrastructure, so it would be better to use the power in place. I was thinking rock crushers/ aggregate production because it’s something that depending on if the project is grid connected or not and depending on what the power company is willing to pay, could create aggregate or sell the power directly.
I really don’t want to support crypto but unfortunately, as a plug and pay solution, it’s a pretty easy and direct one.
Other ideas we’ve tossed around are refrigeration and food preservation, but the problem with those is that they need the power when they need the power, and so it’s not exactly a way to sink excess supply.
It’s tough because the overhead demands of any additional power sink almost always require 24 hours operation. Basically, the cost of a system to do “something” with your extra power is almost always such that you should probably just be running it 24/7.
Still open to more ideas but it will need to be able to pay for itself for me to get people on board.
It can still be a useful sink at small scales. You could make ice at those times of day if you’re eventually going to need that ice later. It takes a lot more energy to chill something (especially water with its high specific heat and latent heat of fusion) that it takes to hold something at temperature in an insulated space. And then go on and use the ice later so that the need to chill something doesn’t have to be synchronized with the exact moment in time you’re drawing energy from the grid to run a refrigeration compressor.
Same with heating. Some smart water heaters can store thermal energy for later, too, and top off their energy usage for some times of day.
I’m not sure if the scale you’re imagining makes these ideas too small to be worth pursuing.
Look into hydrogen production from water electrolysis, if you’re really producing a significant surplus.
There is no meaningful way I can do something with hydrogen outside of as a feedstock into another process.
Things I’ve considered that would help me, running a gravel crusher, or if there was some scaled down hauber Bausch machine. I use a significant amount of gravel and I am always in need of fertilizer.
I know on a small garden scale, clover is a very good companion plant because it affixes nitrogen to the soil. It also acts as a ground cover to reduce moisture loss and suppress weeds, and on top of all of that it attracts bees.
Yeah but I can’t turn electricity into clover
You can run an ICE on hydrogen, with some minor modifications. If you have enough space you can store the produced hydrogen at near atmospheric pressure in a gas holder/gasometer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_holder
As to nitrogen fertilizer, there have been recent improvements in air nitrogen fixation by way of an electric arc/plasma: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=nitrogen+fixation+electric+arc&ia=web e.g. https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2021/ra/d1ra01357b
Yeah I’ve seen the plasma arc thing. I’m vaguely associated with some in the agrovoltaics research community and have considered reaching out. It’s not available to retail consumers yet
Oh hello! You posted on /r Technology and latelly /r Collapse before it all went to shit! I’m a big fan of you!
Oh, hi. Glad you liked my posts. The latest /c/collapse incarnation on Lemmy (we’ve had to move twice) is on https://lemmy.zip/c/collapse btw.
Are you talking about computing power?
I’ve been pondering about this because and feel the need. I don’t have any solar, but I’d like to play around with local AI a bit. I don’t even have the hardware at the moment because driver support isn’t ready on my laptop.
I’d even like to try a coding agent to find out if there are any useful cases. I don’t want to do it in the cloud though. So I thought it’d be cool if someone with cheap or excess electricity could provide their hardware. I think it’s quite a challenge to do that, though.
Right now I’m thinking, maybe running a decentralized Libre Translate service or something similar could be a nice project. Mastodon uses this for post translation and self hosted instances could use it as a translation service. Somewhere, the sun is always shining on someone’s roof with solar, cheap energy and a spare GPU, I assume. I don’t think it makes a difference if a post is being translated in Australia when I browse my timeline at night in Germany.
Peer Tube video encoding could also be done like this.
If anyone has links to ideas about decentralized data centers or whatever that would be, I’d be very interested. I think it would also help with protest against data centers being built, because it’s nice to be able to have examples for alternatives. A way of using what’s already there without building a grid only big tech and the fossil fuel industry need.
Without relying on the internet, people could offer to back up BluRays for friends or the community. Or optimize the hell out of HomeAssistant to run Jellyfin tasks and stuff when there’s lots of solar.