There is a problem looming on the horizon as more of the worlds energy is sourced from renewable energy sources, the fossil fuel brigade have been screaming about it for years; the energy generation isnt stable. In a sense they have a point the wind doesnt always blow and the sun doesnt always shine. Of course that only matters if you assume energy consumption cant be matched to energy generation. OK we arent suggesting you can only turn your lights on in the daytime, that would be bizarre, but its pretty clear that as renewable energy generation is now becoming cheaper than other methods, that over-capacity of generation is an obvious next step.

Thats Problem Solved Then?

Well, no. You cant just keep pumping energy into an electicity grid if no-one is taking it out of the other end. On average energy consumption is reasonably predictable, but no-one knows exactly when you might want to boil your kettle for a cup of tea, but its OK becase a little bit of overcapacity can be managed by the grid. However imagine if electicity were water, if you try to pump too much in, pipes are going to burst. So if we imagine an overprovisioned energy network of wind, solar, tidal etc. that sometimes is going to have way more energy than is needed what can we do? We could tell energy producers to stop generating, but they have invested a lot of time and money and they arent going to be too pleased about that, so we probably would have to pay them to stop. That kind of has problems though as then you are paying more to buy energy than you need to.

Use The Excess Energy!

Of course how obvious, is that, we could store it in batteries, or make hydrogen gas to use when there is less energy later, wow that was easy! Except that those types of infrastructure are dedicated and expensive, you arent going to build that if its only used a few times a year, so there will always be some overcapacity that cant be accomodated.
Hold on though, does cryptocurrency hold the answer? We all know Bitcoin is energy intensive, could we use the PoW algorithm to balance demand on the energy grid!?

Close, But No Cigar

Unfortunately that isnt going to work either, custom ASICs are expensive investments and no-one is going to buy them just to turn them on on the odd occasions for grid balancing. But PoW on GPUs could work couldnt it? No, all PoW can eventually be optimized away to FGPA/ASIC if the scale becomes large enough, and grid balancing is large scale.

But fear not, there is an answer. The problem we have identified is that using dedicated equipment isnt ever going to be the answer, so we need some mechainsm to use existing idle capacity, ideally distributed widely and easily available, that will provide some value.

BOINC

The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing has been around for decades, big science problems are broken into chunks, sent to volunteers who process the work and send it back. The World Community Grid allows ordinary people to help in computations that seek to discover disease cures, other projects work in Astronomy, Particle Physics, Pure Mathematics and much more. The main point for this discussion is that it all runs on standard, idle computer equipment, in fact that was the whole point of BOINC; to use idle resources for some positive outcome. Unlike PoW the computations are complex and need general purpose computer facilities, it cant be optimised to GPU in many cases, and FGPA/ASIC is infeasible.
So we have a method for ordinary people, businesses and the grid itself to balance overcapacity, but where is the incentive for anyone to do so?

Gridcoin

Gridcoin wasnt conceived as an energy grid balancing mechanism, the 'Grid' refers to computing grids, but its an absolutely amazing coincidence of language the cryptocurrency that rewards people for doing scientific research on the BOINC platform, could be the ideal solution for balancing energy grids!
The more science you do the more Gridcoins you earn, but also there is a feature called 'rain' where anyone can issue additional rewards to processors of work on the BOINC network. It would be easy for energy grid operators to buy Gridcoins and rain them back to the network to incentivise people to turn on energy consuming computers and soak up excess energy generation. We can easily imagine a whole marketplace and rewards system springing up around this.

I Love It When A Plan Comes Together

But its even better when happy co-incidence leads to great outcomes too. The aptly named Gridcoin crypto-currency, could be a way for us to reach a clean, green, science optimised energy infrastucture. All we need is the attention of some green lobbyists, some energy companies and some enlightened politics.