Aeronaut wrote:

The trick will be arranging that power circuitry to deliver the constant 50/60Hz 3phase output, as the pulse rate goes up and down to match power demand from the local/national grid.

The easiest way may be to go to DC then generate the nice stable sinusoidal mains frequency from that, but its not necessarily the most efficient.

My thinking is that FFs would be installed in clusters, and they could be shut off or cranked up as 5MW units. That’s a small enough slice to smoothly match rises and falls in demand, I think. That way each unit would have a constant pulse rate, so no need to fiddle the frequency!

Every time I do rough calcs using 5MW generators I find myself sub-noting up to 15MW instantly available peak reserve per core. (boy is this juice going to cost you!). If most of the fast food and gas/convenience stores had a FF on their roof, there would be tens of thousands of local correction nodes across the continent. But first we’ll have to invest billions in a smart grid…

I think you get anode meltdown at 15MW. Increasing output would have to be from reserve idle units. Every power plant and system has to size itself for “peak demand”. So X megawatts of new FF capacity would have to replace X megawatts of peak conventional capacity. I guess that means some deliberately idled units most of the time!