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Comment by alsetmusic | Hacker News Reader

Well, there's an admin killing clean energy so I think we know where that anger belongs. Dems suck too, but what can you do. One is worse, clearly.

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As much as I wish it were different I think this would be the outcome under any administration. Natural gas in the USA is just stupidly cheap inflation adjusted, is energy dense, power plants require few land resources, pipeline infrastructure exists, robust and deep supply chain, etc. I don't hold much hope of the USA kicking the habit as it is such a competitive advantage. If we don't burn it locally it will be exported at a huge margin for geopolitical advantage. 1/3 of the CO2 reductions in the US power sector are due to renewables, 2/3 are from natural gas. Renewables would need to be backed up by additional gas capacity, although the average capacity factor would be reduced with a more robust renewable build out.

Biden was not paying companies to NOT build windplants.

No, the result would not be the same. Provably so.

Also, in fact, companies turned to Trump because democrats started to be serious about anti trust actions.

Billions of OUR dollars. Dumped into the MIC for Iran, wasting billions more of our dollars by surging energy prices. Then spending billions more to kill wind projects. Adding at least a billion to his own wallet.

How many billions of dollars will we allow this clown and his cronies to steal from us?

During the Biden administration almost 40 trillion ft^3 of natural gas was produced annually breaking all records. I do agree the policies of energy were more all the above during Biden and renewable build outs were incentivized additional to record gas production.

I think the biggest material factor between the two administrations is coal capacity factors on the grid are increasing again which would not happen under an alternative admin. We were on a good path towards phasing out coal completely with natural gas and an increasingly significant amount of renewable energy.

How did the natural gas growth change from before? How did the solar/wind change from before?

The data you’ve presented indicates you think only reducing the natural gas number to 0 with no context about trend lines or alternates is an acceptable solution which is obviously nonsensical.

The whole idea that a solar panel needs to be backed up by gas is absolutely asinine. We live in a capitalist society if there is so much excess power in the day and little power during the night then that means there is money to be made by storing that energy then doing arbitrage with daytime vs nighttime rates.

Build the solar panels and the battery will come because there is serious money to be made as the differential increases.

I agree I don't think it will always be the case but in the 1-5 year term the economics dictate that is what you get, full battery backup to run something like a data center is expensive even if technically feasible. It is not 1:1 backup but significant additional marginal gas production is going to come online with battery and solar build outs, that is what you see in grid queues across the US.

You are ignoring the fact that batteries like many other flex grid assets have diminishing marginal returns to arbitrage power. That is why you see them in composition with other flexible base load resources in a market system. We could reform the system to have other objectives.

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/australia-home-batteries

Recently posted on HN today. A very good example of the argumentation I was making Because these batteries are grid tied home battery there isn't a need to have a huge land monolith in an area for massive storage. It just feeds back into the millions of kilometers of powerlines already existing

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