[pydry]

Big picture is that theyre not just cheaper but 5x cheaper.

In fact it's so much cheaper that it's even more economic to use solar/wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that to generate electricity.

Never mind all of the cheaper short term storage options (pumped storage, batteries).

And this doesnt even account for the storage nuclear power would need (it's even less economic to use it for load following) or the need for taxpayer indemnification against catastrophe cleanup costs.

[m348e912]

>> In fact it's so much cheaper that it's even more economic to use solar/wind to synthesize natural gas and burn that to generate electricity.

Interesting. Never heard of this being done in practice before, do you have references of what you're referring to?

[pydry]

https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...

It's not done at scale because we don't actually have that much spare renewable energy capacity. Whenever renewables power over 90% of current usage on one particular day anywhere it tends to hit the news.

Pretty much every MWh generated by green energy these days is just a MWh of natural gas extracted from the earth that is not burned. This actually means that while we use as much natural gas as we do that the economics of nuclear power are even worse by comparison.

The above study is a hypothetical solution to solar and wind routinely overproducing what batteries and pumped storage can keep up with. Even then it probably wouldn't make economic sense until natural gas extraction gets hit with import or carbon taxes. Just because it's cheaper than nuclear power that doesn't make it cheap.

[ZeroGravitas]

No one will do this at scale until we stop burning fossil gas.

But as a technology it exists. The early outputs will be for things that can't be replaced with cheap renewable generated electricity, like e-fuels for spacecraft, which Tesla is doing in Texas.