[ThePhysicist]

Storage is a big, unsolved problem. As a quantitative resource on that I can recommend "Sustainable Energy: Without The Hot Air" by the great (and unfortunately recently deceased) David MacKay [1], it's available for free.

For a large country like the UK or Germany you need to increase electricity production with a slew rate of 6-8 GW/h in the morning, and decrease it with the same rate in the evening. Currently the only feasible storage form (in terms of quantity and regulation speed) for that is hydro, but most countries simply don't have enough mountain areas to make this work.

1: https://www.withouthotair.com/

[thehappypm]

Does storage matter short term?

If my utility runs a gas generator, wind and solar allow it to run at some fraction of its capacity most of the time. Sure, overnight when there’s little wind, the gas might go full throttle. But that’s still a huge reduction in emissions if most of the time the grid is fully wind/solar.

[snapplebobapple]

Yes, storage matters quite a lot because electric grids burn out if supply doesn't equal demand constantly. You need the storage not only for overnight, you need it to store energy when wind and solar are overproducing relative to current demand and you need it to supply that stored energy when wind and solar are underproducing if you expect the grid to get rid of demand resources like coal and especially natural gas.

another unmentioned cost of especially wind, but also to some extent solar is the huge transmission upgrade needed to support wind. It is a huge cost and it is never accounted for in the numbers when people are pushing for wind and solar (because it usually ruins the claim that wind and solar are cheaper over their lifecycle vs natural gas). They are also costs the consumer largely gets stuffed with via billing items outside of energy cost so it's kind of insidiously hidden from the consumer.

[vkou]

The problem is that we don't need to halve our emissions, as would happen if we fully switched from coal to natgas (Presumably sourced from a magical, peaceful land of unicorns, as opposed to, say, the Russian Federation, or some middle eastern despot.)

We need to zero our emissions, if we want to avoid climate catastrophe. And natgas isn't going to do that for us.

[thehappypm]

I think you’re letting perfect be the enemy of good. How do we get to zero? First cut in half. Then cut the second half. Waiting for a perfect solution today when there’s incremental progress to be made is foolish

[vkou]

That's not going to happen, though. What is going to happen is we'll invest trillions of dollars into natgas infrastructure and then go all whoopsie-daisies-we-can't-afford-to-just-let-it-sit-idle, and we'll be permanently locked into it.

Temporary hacks have an odd way of becoming permanent features, especially when mind-blowing amounts of money are on the line.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

That's exactly why you don't do that kind of temporary hack. Temporary hacks come in a variety of colors.

[raxxorraxor]

It is certainly an unsolved problem but there are nice ideas floating around. I don't know about feasibility or scalability but some suggest to just elevate land with fluid pressure or they suggested air filled tanks that are drawn to the bottom of seas so that energy is generated from buoyancy. That latter approach allegedly can be scaled to multiple GWh.

Sure, you need a deep see and installation is difficult but the latter approach has the advantage of not needing pumps, which are usually maintenance heavy.

[throwoutway]

Where can I read more about the air filled tanks being “scaled to multiple GWh”?