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Comment by ukulele | Hacker News Reader

This is essentially incorrect. Renewables have predictable generation when deployed on a large scale, and gas peaker plants can respond to changes as needed. With the simplistic model of the article (nuclear + wind), it is easy to reach the wrong conclusion.

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Gas can be used as a complement to renewable, but at this point you mostly have renewable helping gas power plants saving money instead of the 100% renewable often advertised. Which is what I meant when I said :

> Renewable is OK at producing Energy, which we don't really care about after a certain point.

Really? In Australia we still see large wind and solar ramp events that are hard to forecast and predict even with some of the most modern weather forecasting approaches, these are solvable problems but I think calling renewables predictable is a bit hand-wavy IMO.

It's not about forecasting the weather: good gas peakers can respond in under 10 minutes. I meant predictable in the sense of day/night/season.

Gas is a good backup due to it’s response rate yes but regarding renewable power generation, they are all about weather.

http://www.hellogrid.com.au/energy-exchange/1117/

As solar utility scale sites become more common (and they are), a cloud growth can wipe 100s of MW off the grid very quickly and the problem is it is very hard to tell how much will get wiped off and when (measured in minutes).

Gas will be in the mix for longer than other fossil fuels due to its reaction time but as storage becomes cheaper and gas more expensive, it will be used less and less IMO.

Storage isn't physically doable in practice though, and it's not just a matter of cost at our current consumption level. We just don't have the natural ressources to build enough storage.

To illustrate, storage is already really cheap in practice thanks to Pumped-storage, we just have really sort supply of locations for such plants.

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