Comment by geysersam
3 days ago
Do you know what the main obstacles are for producing synthetic fuels from surplus renewable electricity production today? It doesn't seem like a lot of companies are doing it at large scale, even while the electricity price difference between summer and winter is large.
I think the main obstacles are the existing players in the energy space. They are huge organisations for the most part and take a long time to change, even if they were motivated to do so. Things have changed rapidly the past few years.
It can also be argued that many of them are not motivated, because they make money from selling electricity from highly valued assets (power plants). If electricity gets permanently cheaper, they stand to lose a lot of money.
There are probably other obstacles as well, but I don't think any of them are insurmountable.
Synthetic fuel production has a very low efficiency, but that does not matter if electricity cost is cheap. So the idea is to overbuild electricity consumption and let them sit idle when electricity is expensive.
But, AFAICT, to overbuild consumption the capital cost is so high that it does not make much economic sense.