There was a successful experiment doing something very similar to this - although I can't find the article - with cold storage facilities in the Netherlands.
Cold storage is apparently a pretty big industry there, and all those buildings are designed to be highly thermally-efficient anyways. There's also a huge segment of the cold storage market where the exact temperature of the storage doesn't matter, it just needs to stay within a specific band.
So what happened? The experiment (which was successful) effectively turned the freezers into batteries. The control systems were set to lower the temperature to two or three degrees lower than usual during the night (which made the cooling plants run longer then), and the plants were scaled back to maintenance power-levels during the day, when demand was higher. The grid was happy, since it moved the load to a low-usage time. The storage owners were happy, since they got a deal on the evening electricity. And the things being stored didn't care, since they were all so far frozen anyways. I wonder if you could do a similar program to get them to cool down further when there's excess power on the grid?
Or to solve this at an earlier point, why not just turn off the windmills when the power's not needed. All the windmills in my community have setting that when the wind is too high, the blades on the windmills pivot to the zero lift axis, and they don't spin.
Or to solve this at an earlier point, why not just turn off the windmills when the power's not needed.
Because the subsidies in Germany are tied to the amount of
electricity sold. That's why they're selling even at negative market price -- to collect the feed-in tariff.
Cold storage is apparently a pretty big industry there, and all those buildings are designed to be highly thermally-efficient anyways. There's also a huge segment of the cold storage market where the exact temperature of the storage doesn't matter, it just needs to stay within a specific band.
So what happened? The experiment (which was successful) effectively turned the freezers into batteries. The control systems were set to lower the temperature to two or three degrees lower than usual during the night (which made the cooling plants run longer then), and the plants were scaled back to maintenance power-levels during the day, when demand was higher. The grid was happy, since it moved the load to a low-usage time. The storage owners were happy, since they got a deal on the evening electricity. And the things being stored didn't care, since they were all so far frozen anyways. I wonder if you could do a similar program to get them to cool down further when there's excess power on the grid?
Or to solve this at an earlier point, why not just turn off the windmills when the power's not needed. All the windmills in my community have setting that when the wind is too high, the blades on the windmills pivot to the zero lift axis, and they don't spin.