Rolling out more renewables faster will mean more reliance on gas.

I am not sure how people still don't realise this after ten years of doing this and energy prices going up non-stop.

We did not start to push for renwable energy to get prices lower, this is mainly a mitigation against previously unaccounted-for externalities (CO2 emissions and air pollution).

Complaining about transition costs, to me, is like complaining that industrial waste disposal was cheaper back when we just dumped everything into the next river.

	▲	lostlogin 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		> industrial waste disposal was cheaper back when we just dumped everything into the next river. This is still done. Thames Water.

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nicoburns 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Only needing gas when the renewable energy isn't available seems strictly better than needing gas 24/7

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rcxdude 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

At this point, there's not that much other non-renewable generation on the UK grid, so expanding renewables will reduce the impact of gas on prices (though it'll likely be non-linear).

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spacebanana7 6 days ago | parent [-]

Gas complements renewables really well because gas can readily be tapped “on-demand” whilst renewables can only be tapped “on supply”.

It’s relatively easy to turn off gas when renewables are supplying energy to the grid at near zero cost marginal cost. But also easy to turn on gas when the renewables aren’t supplying energy, or when demand spikes in a manner uncorrelated to renewable generation.

Batteries are a more elegant solution long term, of course.

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pydry 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Gas complements everything well. It's relatively cheap, easy to store power in large amounts and completely dispatchable. Nothing else can do all 3.

Batteries work well for short term day-to-day storage but they're impossibly expensive for seasonal storage which we will need a solution for for the last ~5-10% of decarbonization.

Probably the only way to fully decarbonize will eventually be to synthesize gas.

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SoftTalker 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Gas can be used two ways: Gas in a conventional base-load steam turbine generator power plant is not easy to tap on demand. For peaking plants using gas turbine generators it is, but those are also less efficient.

	▲	ZeroGravitas 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		The article mentions at the same site they're building a gas plant using the same tech as a large ship engines, which is an attempt to hit a sweet spot for future usage as they have high efficiency at part load.