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by spacebanana7 51 days ago
Gas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small.

The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.
2 comments
lucb1e 51 days ago
Saying gas has relatively little emissions reminds me of the joke german car manufacturers are making about their latest combustion cars using relatively little fuel ('hocheffizienzverbrenner'). It's marginal gains. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-... Gas is 200gCO2e/kWh, plain old diesel is 260. Better than nothing but not going to make a big dent

Maybe if you happen to live in a country that primarily uses coal for electricity (up to 400gCO2e/kWh) and you can get cheap oil somewhere, but otherwise you might as well go straight to green energy (whether it glows green or not)

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dalyons 50 days ago
GP is saying gas has relatively little emissions in this scenario because we wont use it much total in a year. Not because its cleaner.
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lucb1e 50 days ago
Ah, that would make sense yes. They did also say intermittency but, yeah, if it's only about true dunkelflaute then...

edit: got curious how much this would amount to, also since the peak demand is usually after sunset. The article (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/we.2554) which wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dunkelflaute&oldi...) cites on this topic says in appendix A

> all the three renewable power generation sources drop below 10% of their capacities for a substantial period of time (approximately ranging from 30% to 50%). Typically, offshore wind power production has a higher capacity factor in comparison to its onshore counterpart. On average, the Dunkelflaute events account for around 7%–8% of the time per year. These numbers do not vary much across the years.

That's a heck of a lot of gas still, and that's ignoring the "intermittency" part (that might mean every day after sunset, not a rare sequence of weather events). But yeah I guess they didn't mean it as an either-or that replaces other storage options

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marcosdumay 51 days ago
All of that is right... But we needed something to make batteries competitive with gas, because the renewables part is already solved, and we need to move to the next step.
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