1. Something that is already expected to be on a finite time horizon might be a good candidate. Say we wanted to clean up a landfill, and built a recycling facility next to it. We already know that the facility has a limited life, because the landfill will eventually be emptied—excess energy could just be used to reduce the time, or it could only operate with the surplus energy in exchange for taking more time. The point is, use the energy to manipulate the time domain of the problem.
2. What about projects that are too energy intensive to have been implemented previously? There’s a slew of ideas that were never implemented because the energy simply wasn’t there—different manufacturing processes, waste disposal, what have you—which means the economics of their operation wasn’t really considered. If the surplus energy makes them technically feasible, it may also be economically feasible to operate them intermittently.
3. Make the energy more mobile, and take it somewhere else where energy conditions are different in the near term. Ship containers of super-heated salt. Extremely long-distance transmission lines. A fleet of airships to bounce microwaves around. The efficiency losses are now a feature instead of a bug.
1. Something that is already expected to be on a finite time horizon might be a good candidate. Say we wanted to clean up a landfill, and built a recycling facility next to it. We already know that the facility has a limited life, because the landfill will eventually be emptied—excess energy could just be used to reduce the time, or it could only operate with the surplus energy in exchange for taking more time. The point is, use the energy to manipulate the time domain of the problem.
2. What about projects that are too energy intensive to have been implemented previously? There’s a slew of ideas that were never implemented because the energy simply wasn’t there—different manufacturing processes, waste disposal, what have you—which means the economics of their operation wasn’t really considered. If the surplus energy makes them technically feasible, it may also be economically feasible to operate them intermittently.
3. Make the energy more mobile, and take it somewhere else where energy conditions are different in the near term. Ship containers of super-heated salt. Extremely long-distance transmission lines. A fleet of airships to bounce microwaves around. The efficiency losses are now a feature instead of a bug.