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Comment by SlowTao | Hacker News Reader

It was about 15 years back, I remember some reasonably smart but partially anti-renewables folk talking about this. By anti-renewable I would say they were just skeptical with a much higher bar to get over than others. Weren't saying it was impossible but where much more cynically inclined.

They argued there would be issues with renewables unless there was a big uptake in storage. That was the key to making it all happen. Well now we have a big uptake in storage and it is starting to look like the future in that sense is very bright.

Scale is funny like that, it looks like it won't happen for the longest time and then it suddenly become ubiquitous. There is still a long way to go but improvements are happening fast.

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We’re still a long way from figuring out storage for renewables. Here in Ireland in winter we get weeks long periods of calm, cold, overcast weather where renewables generate almost nothing. There’s no known energy storage mechanism that can handle this, so we still have to burn fossil fuels. I don’t doubt we’ll figure it out, but I think skeptics still have a valid point on storage.

Yeah, it's a struggle. The upshot is most of the cost of combined cycle natural gas peaker plants are the fuel costs, so while storage solutions get figured out, or the renewable get massively overbuilt, you can maintain the FF infra for fairly cheap for the these days.

Incorrect.

most of the cost of peaker plants is the capital cost. The fixed costs are high and spread over few hours (peaker) or even no hours at all (just providing ready capacity if required e.g. ready in case of faults with generators or transmission).

The variable costs (fuel) are normally quite irrelevant.

Ireland already has the gas capacity built though. It provides about 50% of their power today, so they just need to phase it down and then out, not build it from scratch.

This is broadly true of most developed nations.

If the standby gas capacity is needed to cover a majority of country's needs a few times a year, can it really be phased down?

You can always produce hydrogen or methane and use ordinary gas turbines to turn it back to electricity.

In theory yes, but in practice we haven’t done it yet and until we have it’s reasonable to be skeptical about it.

There are demonstrators being built everywhere.

Which proves my point?

For varying values of „we haven’t done it yet“.

“It” being power a country for any length of time from hydrogen or methane created from renewable energy

That is very different from "there is no known mechanism". We also never powered a country exclusively with nuclear energy, but I think most people would agree that it can be done.

This is very tiresome. The fact is, green hydrogen or methane on a scale that would replace fossil fuels during extended periods of low renewable output is miles from proven technology. I’m a booster of renewable energy but some realism is also warranted.

to me this is all % based. 15% natural gas is way better than 90% coal or something like that.

Did you thank China for doing the hard work of scaling?

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