alt Hacker NewsYep. The key difference is that a gas power plant can be cut off completely at any time. For example if a trigger happy leader decided to cause military mayhem in an unpredictable region supplying a large proportion of the world’s gas. The sun, however, keeps on shining.
I didn’t mean to compare them, implying that gas or anything else is better. I’m a big fan of renewables, especially solar, but just wanted to bring this aspect up. It’s confusing to me because I get excited when I see these numbers only to later deflate when I figure out the total generated kWh quantity. It would be great if there would be a “synthetic” calculation which takes into account the estimated generation and smoothing out using batteries, which would also take into account the extra cost of batteries. That would be a more apples to apples comparison both in terms of net generation and cost.