4 ms·

I think it's possible that geothermal and hydro can get us 20% of our total power (though that relies on very optimistic estimates being correct), but I think t

I think it's possible that geothermal and hydro can get us 20% of our total power (though that relies on very optimistic estimates being correct), but I think that's misunderstanding what we actually need baseload for, which is when wind and solar aren't working to provide either enough, or any, power (for whatever reason). You need to be able to replace all of their power for relatively short periods of time (though to sustain our current lifestyle, probably longer), not 20% of their power all of the time. Being able to ramp up a bunch of normally idle natural gas plants at a moment's notice lets us do that right now, but part of that is that existing natural gas plants don't necessarily all fail at once... whereas wind and solar plans would have pretty correlated failures.

Robotbeat 9y ago
What that 20% does is lets you stretch your storage capacity much more, especially when combined with some demand-response and the remainder of the reduced capacity wind and solar (photovoltaics will basically ALWAYS produce /some/ power during the day, even if it's cloudy). It helps tremendously. I do think we'll use batteries for immediate power instead of natural gas. And the natural gas plants we DO have (hopefully not many of them!) could be more efficient because we won't have to ramp them up and down quickly, so we can use the much higher efficiency combined cycle plants. (But this idea of replacing nuclear with renewables and peakers seems really dumb to me... it's clearly a step backwards in emissions when we should be targeting fossil fuel plants for shutdowns. The fact that supposedly "green" people are pushing this is really, really weird.)