Comment by gridspy
9 hours ago
Perhaps not in a 100% world, though I'll give you the point that they are useful now.
In a 100% renewable world we would not be extracting or refining oil. Natural gas (used by these turbines) is a byproduct of oil drilling. Were we not burning the oil, the natural gas might be too expensive alone.
Also, in a 100% renewable world we would (by definition) have enough generation all the time - (covered by batteries and good baseload sources) that turbine power was no longer required to cover peak loads.
It's not clear (yet) what a 100% clean energy powered world would use to cover the last couple of percent of demand when loads peak and/or variable generation troughs for extended periods.
It'll be some combination of demand management (which isn't nearly as horrifying as people make it out to be), pumped hydro, long-duration batteries like iron-air, but also possibly burning hydrogen or hydrogen-derived synthetic fuels (produced by electrolysis when hydrogen is abundant) and/or biofuels in turbines.
Somebody calculated that a home in UK needs 1 Megawatt-Hour battery to backup solar energy during the winter. I suspect in 10 years that may cost below 25K, a small fraction of the property cost.
There is a time- honored, straightforward way to deal with the last two percent problem, which is to overbuild by a couple of percent or so.
That’s not how the maths works unfortunately.
Basically, you end up having to overbuild to crazy levels, or build insane amounts of battery storage, which only gets used a few days a year.
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Particularly with the development of fracking, natural gas production is no longer a just a byproduct of oil production, and can be (and is) pursued independently. Nevertheless, I agree that we developing renewables should be our priority.