this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2024
1696 points (95.6% liked)
Microblog Memes
6024 readers
1954 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
- Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
- Be nice.
- No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
- Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.
Related communities:
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Most use a horizontal single axis configuration and could just tilt the panels away from the sun.
The real question that we should be asking, is why nobody can think of what to do with free energy?
Desalination? Mine Bitcoin? Giant space laser?
It's not a question of ideas, it's a question of money. Building things to use excess power costs a lot of money.
In some markets, the power price actually goes negative and consumers can be paid to use energy.
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/20/energy/three-mile-island-microsoft-ai/index.html
I think there's plenty of money out there to use excess power, someone just has to connect the dots...
Or in a pinch: just run big-ass space heaters. Seriously. It's a stupid way to burn off excess power, but it's dirt simple and cheap. Just have a big array of resistive heaters out in an empty field somewhere with a high fence around it. Need to burn off an extra GW? Run it through massive heating elements and burn burn it off. It's a stupid waste of good energy, but as an emergency backup, it's not a bad option. It's trivially easy to dispose of huge amounts of excess electricity if you just run the mother-of-all space heaters. Run your stupid giant resistive heater at the bottom of a lake for even better effect.