Comment by adrianN
2 days ago
Power2Gas and using the existing infrastructure for gas storage is a known solution for storing months of power. It might not be the cheapest solution though.
2 days ago
Power2Gas and using the existing infrastructure for gas storage is a known solution for storing months of power. It might not be the cheapest solution though.
Methane storage is only like a few weeks at most.
Storing months worth of power is not something we do with natural gas or even oil today.
Germany has like three months worth of nat gas reserves. See for example https://www.intellinews.com/how-many-days-of-gas-consumption.... Building bigger gas tanks is not rocket science either.
Power2gas+solar/wind produced energy is a lot more expensive than natural gas and requires solar/wind to routinely overproduce.
...hence why there isnt much of it. It either requires subsidies or for natural gas to be taxed more.
Windless night produced electricity from stored solar energy via windgas is still cheaper than nuclear power produced on sunny, windy days though: https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...
Solar is always producing, at some percentage (may be very a very low percentage) of full capacity. So, we want it to routinely overproduce. That’ll also cut the days that we need to dip into storage.
> It either requires subsidies or for natural gas to be taxed more.
Subsidies are hard to calculate anyway. For example almost all fossil fuels get a pair of massive subsidies; we let them dump their carbon into the air for free instead of charging for it, and we build and man a bunch of aircraft carriers to go around defending the shipping lanes that it gets sent through.