alt Hacker NewsWe’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.
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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.
to me this is all % based. 15% natural gas is way better than 90% coal or something like that.
You can always produce hydrogen or methane and use ordinary gas turbines to turn it back to electricity.