[teucris]

The article specifically notes the following:

>We can get far without worrying about the last 5-10%. The solutions for the last 5-10% could be fossil fuels in the short-term, long-duration storage as it matures, or easily storeable e-biofuels.

[mtoner23]

So then they are wrong. The last 5-10 percent is the hardest part and it's the one consumers complain the most about! You can't run a factory on 90% power availability

[DangitBobby]

But you _can_ run it on 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels to achieve 100% power availability, which is what GP and the article suggest.

[Ajedi32]

The issue is that to achieve that you can't just build 90% solar plus 10% fossil fuels. You would need to build 100% solar + 100% fossil fuels for the 10% of the time solar doesn't work.

[ZeroGravitas]

If you build batteries on the scale that the article suggests (and is probably going to happen in the real future) you can use batteries charged from fossil fuels.

It's a few percent dirtier (round trip losses) but in return you can use gas plants that are 50% more efficient to charge them rather than run peaker plants.

And of course that's ignoring wind which is nearly as cheap as solar and anti-correlated with it.

[Ajedi32]

That's fair, batteries are somewhat useful for peaking even in a world powered 100% by fossil fuels so there's some infrastructure that can be shared. And even on a cloudy day solar output isn't 0%. But I'm skeptical the overlap here is significant enough to invalidate my basic point, though I admit it's a big simplification.

Reality is extremely complicated, so realistically the exact mix of solar + fossil fuels that makes sense is going to depend on a huge number of factors and vary from region to region depending on weather, fuel costs, construction costs, transmission costs, and probably a thousand other things I haven't thought of. The best thing to do is stay out of the way of both industries and let the market sort all of that complexity out.

I would speculate the result of that is going to be a lot more renewables than currently exist, mainly due to the drastic reduction in the cost of solar and batteries that has been occurring over the last few decades, but I don't think it'll be 100% or even 90% renewables either (expect perhaps in the extremely long term). Time will tell.

[pfdietz]

It helps that the cost of a simple cycle gas turbine power plant (before the recent data center demand spike) is around $600/kW, maybe a factor of 20 cheaper per kW than a nuclear power plant. So backing up the whole grid with such generators wouldn't be that expensive.

[pingou]

Good thing it's already built then! Well, of course it cost money to maintain though.

[Ajedi32]

Yes, but if you need to have all that infrastructure anyway it no longer makes sense to compare the cost of solar+batteries with the cost of fossil fuels because you actually need to have both.

If you compare the total cost of solar with just the fuel cost of fossil fuels (ignoring its CapEx and non-fuel OpEx) that swings the equation a lot.

[pishpash]

Infrastructure cost for 100% is the same as infrastructure cost for 10%? That's not true. The distribution network is the part that can't be scaled, but it can also be reused for either source, so it doesn't double in cost.

[Ajedi32]

No, I'm saying infrastructure cost for 100% is the same as infrastructure cost for 100%. You can't build 10% as much fossil fuel infrastructure and expect it to carry 100% of the load when solar isn't working. And obviously I'm talking about generation here, not distribution.

[zozbot234]

That's not carbon neutral. You can use synthetic fuels to make it fully carbon neutral (way easier to store than the often-proposed H2) but that's really just another battery.

[whynotmaybe]

You can run anything on 90% renewable and anything else for the remaining 10%.

As my house is on hydro-energy and everything is electric, I'm currently on 100% renewable and majors factories around me are the same.

Yes, hydro isn't available everywhere, just like solar or wind isn't, but wherever it's possible, we should have it.

[IshKebab]

Sure but I think if solar really did provide 90% of the world's electricity it wouldn't be inaccurate to say it powered the world.

(Heating and transport are harder to solve of course.)

[pfdietz]

It would be inaccurate in that it would not, in fact, be powering the world.

The bigger deceit in the statement was the implication that only batteries were needed to "power the world". This. Is. Wrong.

[zekrioca]

Yes, one can. The issue is that it requires synchronization.