this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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TBH i think the best use of energy is to consume it as immediately as possible.
When the sun shines, solar energy prices are cheap because there's a lot of supply, and then you gotta run all the factories at high speed. This way, you don't need to store a lot of energy for the night.
If only factories were built that way.
In reality, the amount of adjustable load is rather small. Currently, we’re using that in the reserve market to balance the grid a little bit. It’s enough to deal with some frequency deviations, but nowhere enough to handle intermittent energy production.
Generally speaking, factories are designed to run 24/7, and it’s not easy way to drop production rate without causing some strange problems. That’s why you need grid energy storage.
But if factories could drop to 10% at night, and gradually ramp up to 100% in the noon, that would be ideal from the energy perspective. Storting energy is hard and comes with all sorts of issues, so factories like that could avoid all those issues. Would be great, but that’s not the world we live in.
the same is true for living animals. they're designed to run 24/7, and there is no easy way to drop metabolic activity without causing some strange problems.
except that's not how it is. animals can sleep. nature has mastered energy-efficiency by making animals only intermittently active. maybe nature's one step ahead of us, this time.
Sure is. Animals can drop to various kinds of low activity states such as sleep or even hibernation. Sleep occurs every night, and animals seem to be pretty good at it.
In an industrial context though, frequent shutdowns and startups are avoided, because they’re really complicated to carry out. It also takes a while to get product quality back to normal, so you’ll be wasting materials and energy in the meanwhile. Shutdowns are needed though, because machines wear down and require maintenance, filth builds up and requires cleaning.
I mean literally everything of this is also true for animals.
And yet biology decided to implement sleeping for most animal species. Because the advantages are simply worth it in the long run. What i'm saying is that industry is short-sighted if they think that a nightly shutdown would be "not worth it". Yes, i'm aware it's really complicated, but it can be done and sooner or later probably should be done.
Most processes were built very large to reap the benefits of the economies of scale. This means that after each shutdown it may take days for things reach optimal temperature, concentration, speed or some other metric. For example, when baking bread or freezing vegetables, the relevant machine would need to reach a particular temperature before it can actually start producing. Larger the machine, longer it takes. This is the fundamental problem why startups take so much time.
If you went really small scale, the startup time would be cut to a fraction. If you’ve ever made ice cream at home, you’ll know it only takes about 30 minutes for the machine to get cold enough and about 60 min for the ice cream to be ready. If all industry happened at this scale, you totally could shutdown every night. It’s just that small scale production is woefully inefficient. The amount of energy and materials it requires is just absurd when compared to industrial scale.
I wonder what would it take to get the best of the both worlds. No idea if that’s even possible.