alt Hacker NewsI mean, who cares? Fire up the gas plants in the one week a year you have weather anomalies. We’d still be 90+% carbon free which would be incredible. The last gap can be solved at a later point as technology evolves
Replies
hunterpayne • yesterday at 7:02 AM
My friend, renewables only have a capacity factor of .1 (10%). That means those "gas plants" (really coal, and the worst quality coal on the planet too) are running 90% of the time. There is a reason why France's grid makes 7x the power for the same CO2 emissions as Germany.
➕ show 1 reply
And replacing the natural gas burned in those turbines with hydrogen won't be very expensive, since they will be used so infrequently. Storing energy as hydrogen is much cheaper than storing it in batteries, as measured by cost of storage of capacity.