alt Hacker NewsBatteries taking over gas peakers is the next milestone I’m looking forward to. We will need gas generation for base load for quite a while due to the pure infrastructure that exists.
I do fear that natural gas may end up as a Nuclear scenario where in we do not wholly embrace natural gas Fuel Cells that produce electricity with no emissions. Yes you have the fracking issue but the US owns that environmental damage within its borders instead of outsourcing mineral extraction to poorer countries. We solve the biggest issue with fossil fuels (emissions) while working on limiting environmental impacts on extraction. It’s also way less noisy than gas turbines and can be scaled to basically any size.
Bloom is the gold standard right now but I hope they get strong competition soon, I truly believe/hope that Natural Gas fuel cells are a massive piece to the future energy puzzle.
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Not sure that will come to pass. With the drop in price of both solar and batteries being not only continuous but accelerating, we're quickly approaching a tipping point where it will become uneconomical to not replace anything grid-tied fossil-fuel with solar/wind+battery.
Quickly being in the next decade or two.
To be clear, fuel cells are considered "low air pollution" because they eliminate certain nasty combustion products (NOx), but they still produce as much CO2 per kWh as a gas turbine.
Arguably that CO2 stream is concentrated and a candidate for capture/sequestration, but no one is doing that in practice.