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Efficiency for industrial chemistry is massively dependent on the processes being continuous. The processes often don’t work, or work poorly, until you reach a stable equilibrium, which can take many hours. An enormous amount of effort is expended to ensure this in real industrial processes. Otherwise, you are just burning resources for negligible output.

The idea that we’ll do industrial chemistry with intermittent energy surpluses is unrealistic unless we are okay with yield per unit of energy being very poor relative to continuous processes.



Exactly. Chemistry can be done that way, in batches. Chemical engineering cannot, it's not a batch process, it's all rate stuff.


Aluminium smelters already adjust their electricity consumption throughout the day to take advantage of changing power prices.




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