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by xbmcuser
866 days ago
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Today solar electricity is already cheaper than natural gas and by 2030-31 solar and wind electricity cost will be 1/4 to 1/8 of today's prices looking at the avg 10% cost decline we are seeing. The advantage of natural gas being cheaper than solar was 4-5 years ago now it's no longer the case. Natural gas advantage now is of having being able to produce electricity when needed but as battery storage prices drop it will also be priced out from that market in many places with solar and wind availablity. |
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Does that include transmission? Most population centers already have the pipeline network needed to bring them gas but the getting power from giant solar projects in the desert (where it's sunny) to the eastern interconnection (where most people live) is still an unmet need.
> as battery storage prices drop
Eventually, but at present our grid-scale storage has a capacity of ~30GW on a grid of ~1200GW; it's going to take something like a trillion dollars and a generation to build out grid-scale storage to the point where we can even support a 100% renewable grid.
We'll get there eventually but until grid-scale storage is installed and ready, the gas plants (with their fast start/stop ability) are what's enabling the renewables to come online and replace our older coal and nuke plants.
We're probably going to have to lean even more on gas since the first ~500GW of renewables are replacing existing coal/nuclear we're losing, but once the grid storage tech catches up we can start installing that in lieu of new gas plants and replacing the ones we've already built.
Tl;dr: we'll get there but not in the lifetime of a furnace