Comment by fpoling
9 hours ago
The main advantage of gas plants is that they support variability. In a world with enough battery storage to last for days that would be irrelevant. And as an insurance against rare events it is better to keep coal plants as transportation and storage of coal is vastly more resilient to interruptions.
Gas turbines can also run on synthetic methane or hydrogen, which is nice.
Building new gas power plants for backup is currently the plan the Germany is implementing for it's future renewables powered electric grid.
https://biz.liga.net/en/energy/news/germany-to-build-11-gw-i...
In mean time, it looks like coal in Germany will used for longer.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/news/german-regulator-says-n...
Germany has not learned anything from the war in Ukraine and still think that dependence on gas imports from other countries is fine even for backup.