alt Hacker NewsGas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small.
The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.
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marcosdumay • yesterday at 5:49 PM
All of that is right... But we needed something to make batteries competitive with gas, because the renewables part is already solved, and we need to move to the next step.
Saying gas has relatively little emissions reminds me of the joke german car manufacturers are making about their latest combustion cars using relatively little fuel ('hocheffizienzverbrenner'). It's marginal gains. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-... Gas is 200gCO2e/kWh, plain old diesel is 260. Better than nothing but not going to make a big dent
Maybe if you happen to live in a country that primarily uses coal for electricity (up to 400gCO2e/kWh) and you can get cheap oil somewhere, but otherwise you might as well go straight to green energy (whether it glows green or not)