On a grid with natural gas backup, it's easy to throw in an hour's worth of battery storage to cover minor fluctuations, quote a price "with storage," but still rely on gas if the wind dies down over a large area for a couple days (which does happen).
I'm not talking about smoothing our minor variations in output. I'm talking about enough storage so you don't need fossil backup at all, even if the wind dies down over a large area for a couple days. Battery backup at that scale is not affordable with current technology, but that's what we'd need if we actually got rid of fossil.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/16/1689559...
If you've got fossil backup, an hour is fine. If you don't, it's not.
The grid can have wind/solar and fossil. Generation is dispatched in "merit order" -- when wind/solar is has a lower marginal cost, it will serve load. During other periods (like those windless nights), the fossil will still generate.
Huh? Natural gas only produces about half the CO2 per unit of energy that coal does.
So if burning methane only produces half the CO2 per unit of energy, but just 2% of it leaks into the atmosphere at any point in the production/distribution pipeline, then it's actually worse.
Which have never actually been observed. The whole "positive feedbacks" thing is based on computer models which have been falsified by the actual data.
Besides that, it's based on the fact that we're already seeing things like polar ice melt and emissions from permafrost.
We don't have accurate enough geological evidence to support the kinds of "positive feedback" claims that are being made. Hansen's book lays out a partisan case.
> we're already seeing things like polar ice melt and emissions from permafrost.
What were these things doing a thousand years ago? Five thousand years ago? Ten thousand years ago? We don't know. And that means we don't have the data to put what we're currently seeing in proper perspective. And nobody is claiming that we do: as I said, the claims of possible disaster based on positive feedback are based on models, not data. And the models have been falsified by the data.
It seemed pretty convincing to me, since there were multiple independent lines of evidence that all pointed to the same conclusion.
No, I've read scientific papers on the topic, his and others. I don't trust what is said in books on science for lay people; I've caught too many scientists misrepresenting the science when they write for lay people, because they know they can get away with it (and not just in climate science--I've caught physicists doing it about general relativity and basic QM, which are a lot more solidly nailed down by evidence and controlled experiments than climate science is).
Backing up by natural gas doesn't count; natural gas is a fossil fuel and if you take methane into account it might even be worse than coal.
Hydro and geothermal don't need storage but they're also geographically limited. We can't expand them arbitrarily the way we could expand wind/solar. This also means using hydro to store energy from wind/solar can only go so far.
None of this matters in the near term, since we can certainly expand wind/solar a lot before we run into problems. But over the next several decades we need to replace fossil entirely.