In Texas, a new power plant could redefine carbon capture

Switching to gas is just trading one version of disaster for another. Instead of your world being razed by Godzilla you spend lots of money so it gets razed by Hedorah instead.

Still not ideal, of course. But it absolutely has its place as a transition fuel as we work to decarbonize our energy production.

https://thinkprogress.org/colorado-wind-batteries-cheap-12e8...

Of course, gas plants can also function continuously, and for baseline, nothing beats nuclear. But burning gas for energy is far better than just releasing it unburned in to the air, or flaring it for no productive purpose.

As we get more large-scale batteries online, the variable output of things like wind and solar will matter less, and they will be able to provide an ever-increasing percentage of our energy mix. This is well underway, but it is a huge task that will take a long time to complete.

Solar is particularly good at addressing daily peaks because those peaks generally happen during the day. Wind is good at relatively steady production around the clock because there is almost always wind blowing somewhere.

Coal is pretty terrible because it takes hours to react to changes in demand. This is why we have the term “baseload”: the rest of the industry must be highly dispachable to work around the high thermal mass (and resultant low responsiveness) of coal plants.

In addition coal plant tends to be large monolithic production, so the loss of one plant represents a significant proportion of supply. Coal is thus a net hazard to power reliability.

Nigeria flares something like 700 million cubic feet of gas every day due to lack of transport infrastructure.

I also think that variability is a lot more than just 20%. I think there is 50% variation between December and July in most of the USA just based on sunlight.

That means you would need to 20x overprovision solar in winter, plus you have a massive problem that you have 20x overgeneration in summer months (what do you do with all that energy?).

Battery storage doesn't help with this, as you'd need an absolutely enormous amount of storage to net off summer production with winter usage, and the batteries would basically be full for months then ran down in winter, to never be charged again until summer, so probably one cycle a year.

UK has good wind resource and does generate a lot through that, but it also tends to be less on very cold winter days (when power requirement is at its peak).

Overall I think the best option right now for the UK is something like 50% PV/wind, 25% nuclear baseload and the rest natural gas peaking plants. Even this would be very expensive, the peaking plants will be turned on and off a lot (high maintenance costs) and sitting idle probably throughout the entire summer.

Also with solar + wind their is no need for seasonal storage just have extra capacity and move it from other areas. 30-50% daily grid storage is about the useful limit above that and you're better off with more capacity.

PS: It's a different story if you say live on an island above the attic circle, but that's not a huge market.