You have to get the energy to the appliances though, and there is the bottleneck.
It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negative local energy prices may prove to be a structural problem with it.
I really don’t think that that’s the bottleneck. Peak demand is much higher than average demand. There is a lot of leeway in moving around domestic demand
This literally is the bottleneck which wastes the energy and is so stupidly expensive in the case of Britain (and Germany).
The issue is lots of renewable generation far from places where it is used and not enough transmission capability.
This is called curtailment and is really, really bad. Energy providers need to pay the windfarms for the energy that they (the grid operators) fail to transmit to where it is needed, and they have to pay backup generation (usually gas) at the place with the load.
It’s an issue right now because we lack the ability to steer demand. Connect a few million electric cars and heat pumps to the grid and allow the grid operators to talk to them and the issue is much less severe.
No. Steering demand will not work. Unless by steering demand you suggest forcibly moving millions of people to Scotland.
You have an intermittent power source (wind), far removed from where the energy is needed, and you do not have sufficient electric transmission capacity.
Heat pumps or EVs far removed from the source of generation will not do you any good. You need load where the energy is produced or you need more transmission capacity.
The situation GB has is that there is load, and there is enough renewable generation on the grid to meet that load, however they do not have the capability to bring the electricty to where the load is. You can lessen the demand, but the generation would not get less through that. The only benefit of that would be that you wouldn't have to spin up gas plants, but the same amount of wind energy would still be lost.
It does looks like it will make some sort of sense for compute workloads to move around to be at locations near surplus energy generation. As someone else mentioned bitcoin mining (with the benefit of heat generation) could also be used, but if this practice becomes widespread the attachment of bitcoin pricing to what is in effect negative local energy prices may prove to be a structural problem with it.