[dead]

martinald 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, I have no doubt we can hit even a 90-95% renewable grid. It's the last 5% that is impossible to do without gas.

The cost of those last few percent is absolutely eye watering. The current plan to get it to 100% net zero is by having gas for the final 5% then using carbon capture and storage to offset the emissions.

▲

tcfhgj 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

you don't even need to use carbon capture and storage if you use green gas instead of fossil gas.

▲

oezi 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It is not even the final 5%, it is the final 1-2%, because you need a multi-week dunkelflaute across Europe for the gas turbines to be needed in the future. A lot will also just be curtailing. For instance EV charging might be restricted in the future in such a winter black out scenario.

	▲	iso1631 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> For instance EV charging might be restricted in the future in such a winter black out scenario. Or indeed when petrol runs out as happens occasionally (in 2022 most recently). Of course there's also the problem of gas supplies stopping

▲

Gareth321 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You are making the mistake of thinking that if the grid could provide 100% renewable energy on a windy day at noon in summer, it could also provide 100% renewable energy at night in winter with no wind. Obviously that’s not accurate. Renewables provide energy in a highly volatile sine wave. It’s the bottom of the sine wave which determines the capacity required for base load and dispatchable generation, not the top of the wave.

[Gas is about 11-13x cheaper than renewables with externalities like grid restructure and volatility imputed.](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4028640) That’s not to say renewables don’t have their place in modern grids. In fact an optimal allocation is around 80% renewable in the UK. However, until battery storage becomes about 95% cheaper, it would be ASTRONOMICALLY expensive to make the grid 100% renewable. Trillions of pounds in the UK. An order of magnitude more expensive than just paying higher gas prices.

People often make the mistake of thinking that because wind and sun is free, the cost of energy generation is basically free. Those people don’t understand how many fixed and marginal costs there are. If you’re interested, the paper above provides good insights into those costs.