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hunter

(38,309 posts)
2. All these do is give gas fired power plants time to start up when wind or solar power sags.
Fri Sep 4, 2020, 01:21 PM
Sep 2020

Currently gas power plants are left running on standby, hot and spinning, but not exporting power to the grid, so they can pick up the load instantly when wind or solar power sags.

Batteries may reduce the amount of gas wasted by plants running on standby and also reduce the risk of grid crashes and programmed blackouts when large blocks of solar and wind resources drop out suddenly, which happens, weather being what it is.

The viability of wind energy as a sustainable electricity source is an illusion propped up by natural gas and increasingly desperate Rube Goldberg solutions to problems of grid stability such as batteries.

Typically, in a fully built out wind system, the majority of the power produced over time will still be supplied by fossil fuels, typically natural gas. There comes a point when more wind turbines do not displace any more natural gas, they simply generate electricity that can't be sold. Batteries won't solve this problem because periods of excess wind generated electricity that can't be sold, or insufficient wind power, can last for weeks. The capacity of even huge battery systems is measured in hours, not weeks.

Germany is currently trying to decrease its dependence on coal with natural gas imports. The USA is trying to sell Germany liquefied natural gas LNG as an alternative to pipeline gas imports from Russia.

France eliminated their dependence on coal generated electricity by embracing nuclear power. The last coal mine in France closed in 1992. Germany is still mining coal for power.

The only way to "save the world" is to leave fossil fuels in the ground. To quit fossil fuels we have to quit fossil fuels by fiat. No alternative energy schemes are going to replace fossil fuels by some magic hand of the free market.

If we choose to live in a high energy industrial economy then nuclear power is the only sustainable way to do that. There are several modern nuclear power plant designs that are walk-away safe and able to burn materials that are now considered waste, including used fuel from existing light water reactors. There's enough of this waste, already in storage, to power the U.S.A. for a century or more. We could also get rid of weapons grade plutonium.

Personally I don't think hybrid natural gas / wind power schemes are worthy of promotion. They won't save the world, they scar the natural environment, and they are just plain ugly.

Wind power enthusiasts inevitably dismiss the environmental impacts of natural gas because natural gas is keeping their fantasy alive.




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