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by m348e912
1167 days ago
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>> 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? |
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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.