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Does it? Why not burn gas? Gas shows up when its needed, rain or shine.
There's no evidence that renewables alone can run a competitive industrial economy. It may even be that a renewables-only grid is innately unstable due to the different electrical signatures that solar outputs as compared to water-boiling huge-metal-rotor spinning power plants, which have a certain frequency stability rooted in physics. It's fine to try new things but the risk of failure should be considered, especially if jettisoning a mature system that underpins our entire civilization.
Why not transition to nuclear power? France shows us that a nuclear electrical grid is possible in principle and the changeover can be conducted quickly. Renewables take decades and decades to build out. The countries that have invested heavily in renewables and replaced their coal power base with renewables (China has not done this) seem to suffer very high power prices and often rely on French electricity exports.
Perhaps the issue is that constructing anything in the West is far more expensive than it should be and it's not renewables specifically that is the problem. But it's not clear that renewables are a path to a competitive, reliable grid. No such competitive, reliable, renewable grid has emerged without relying on hydro.
Climate change driven energy policy is not conservative, it doesn't even make sense in climate terms. Once CO2 is emitted, it's going to stay there and keep warming the planet regardless of whether we keep burning coal or not. Transitioning from fossil fuels only marginally slows the rate at which the climate heats up. A far more economical way of controlling planetary temperature is using sulphate aerosols, which have a direct and potent effect.
It's good to move away from coal and oil in order to reduce air pollution. But it's also good to have cheap energy. Cheap energy is at the very heart of industrial civilization and is required for just about everything. What good is it investing heavily in renewables and ending up like Germany, having your chemical and manufacturing sectors wither away without Russian gas?
A renewables only grid is obviously possible, it just involves using a lot of batteries to create synthetic inertia and last through the night, which is just power engineering. It’s not some magic future technology, it’s just a question of execution. There are tons of privately funded solar projects just waiting for utility hookup. Also, there are renewables without the base load problem. Hydro is the biggest one in use right now, but next gen geothermal seems pretty promising (thanks Texas!), and as you pointed out nuclear is great though technically not renewable.
I do agree that Germany did some very silly stuff, and you shouldn't prematurely kill fossil fuels, but we are getting to a point where solar can compete on its own merits and at that point we should let it win.
Is synthetic inertia good enough? What if the power frequency disruption happens faster than it can be synthetically substituted for? A big spinning turbine doesn't need to be told when to pick up the slack, physical inertia has no lag time. Maybe that's what went wrong in Spain during the blackouts there. Thousands of inverters following the same algorithm reducing power output during a voltage slip, causing frequency to get worse.
What actually is reactive power and vars, do we know? I don't. Even amongst experts it seems to be contested. Is it real or is it mathematical abstractions?
Putting all that to one side, can solar actually compete on its own merits in a serious electrical grid? The capacity factor remains low, if you stick them all out in Arizona or the desert somewhere you'll need lots of grid infrastructure to take it where it needs to go, and a heap of batteries. The whole-system constraints are severe, as you mention regarding issues with hookups. I find it instructive that in the datacentre buildout, Musk builds a bunch of gas turbines to power his data centres, despite having considerable solar + battery capability in the Musk zaibatsu. Gas gets you where you want to go! Solar is not so well suited for industrial demands even with batteries. We'd need a whole heap of batteries to manage solarizing the grid and electrifying transport simultaneously, while there's also a datacentre boom.
I think gas should be prioritized more since it fits in the existing system and meets current needs better.
I'm not an electrical engineer, but I thought that was pretty simple for college-level science.
When you have a resistive load on AC power, you can predict the instantaneous current by the instantaneous voltage, as they are directly proportional. When you have an inductive or capacitive load on AC power, you can't. The instantaneous current doesn't only depend on the voltage, it also depends on how "full" the capacitor or inductor is. As a result, voltage and current don't line up with each other. Due to how things work, this makes the current be sine wave that's offset forwards or backwards by a bit from the voltage.
Calculating power is as simple as multiplying the current and the voltage. It's utterly trivial in a steady-state DC system, and simple integral in an AC resistive system. When there's a reactive load, you have to remember that sometimes the voltage is positive but the current is negative, and a positive times a negative gives you a negative value for the load's power consumption. They are literally recharging the grid for a fraction of each cycle, which means they aren't making use of the power.
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Everyone does not have a self-sufficient domestic supply of gas. Gas does not show up when the strait of Hormuz is blocked. Gas is a geopolitical liability.
Gas pollutes. Tail pipe emissions are a major issue in dense cities, which are the norm outside the US. The noise and tail pipe emissions benefits are sufficient reason to electrify or at least hybridize all cars.
Going by cursory google search, Natural Gas will run out between 2060-2070, is an energy transition isn't started. If it is inevitable, why wait for the 11th hour ? Gas is an end-of-life technology. On the other hand, solar and wind are becoming cost competitive with gas (as of 2026), their YOY cost reduction curve implies it will only get cheaper with time.
I should have clarified. I put nuclear in the renewables bucket. Agree with you on all counts on nuclear.
Nuclear as flywheel aside, concerns about the duck curve have been mitigated by the decreasing price of batteries. Seasonal variations will remain, but daily variations can be managed.
No need for a 'perhaps'. It is THE problem plaguing the west right now.
Fair enough, my ideal energy policy is stopgaps now + nuclear while pushing towards nuclear fusion or at least breeder reactors for a longer term solution, I don't think we're far apart.
On the other hand, there are opportunities for gas that aren't exploited, fracking in much of the non-US world. For example the UK still has a decent amount of North Sea resources but they refuse to offer new exploration licenses. In Australia we had all these politicians investing in 'green hydrogen'. $17 billion AUD has already been committed...
Renewable power economics seems like an overly complicated system with solar and wind and batteries, requiring all this sophisticated grid management, power going back and forth, lots of new HVDC, negative prices at noon. I know there are all these studies saying that renewable energy has lower levelized cost of energy or some similar statistic yet I just can't bring myself to believe them when real-world power prices seem to rise and rise continually and the countries that invest most in renewables have the most expensive electricity, unless they're hydrologically blessed.
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