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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Natural gas, wind, and solar are rapidly pushing out coal and nuclear (except where nuclear is receiving a zero carbon subsidy). Oil is not used for electrical generation in mainland USA. 30% of electricity in California already comes from renewables.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/electricity.php

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Oil is not typically a major resource, but in cold winters in gas pipeline-constrained areas, i.e., New York and New England, there is quite a bit of oil generation. Even in high load summer days when gas is available but the load is much higher than the winter you'll see a bunch of oil units turn on.

Oil-fired and dual-fuel units in those RTOs (NYISO and ISO-NE) also make up a pretty large amount of the total installed capacity.

Natural gas is not that good.

CO2 per energy produced per million Btu:

    Natural gas   117.0
    Gasoline      157.2

Natural gas is offsetting coal, not gasoline. Gasoline consumption is overwhelmingly through light vehicles (sedans, SUVs, pickup trucks).

Coal (anthracite) 228.6 Coal (bituminous) 205.7 Coal (lignite) 215.4 Coal (subbituminous) 214.3

As you can see, natural gas has half the CO2 impact per million btus as coal. It's a great bridge until wind, solar, and utility scale batteries take over (natural gas ramps quickly, coal does not, and is much cleaner).

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