Storage is cheap. We have myriad alternatives, according to local requirements. Efficiency used to be a worry, but solar has got so cheap, you just add panels to make up the difference.
Storage is cheap. We have myriad alternatives, according to local requirements. Efficiency used to be a worry, but solar has got so cheap, you just add panels to make up the difference.
And yet it's solar being built all over the world, not storage.
But storage will lag in volume until intermittent sources like solar produces enough in any given region that there are significant periods of excess that aren't better to deal with by bringing other plants offline.
All this is easy for an operator to figure out, daily: add solar, fuel cost falls in exact proportion. When you have to turn off enough banks of panels enough of the time, you start building stuff to absorb that energy for later. But not until building more panels cuts your fuel cost less than building storage cuts your night-time fuel cost. (Wind input makes this calculation less deterministic.)
That, combined with the ability to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and convert that into Methane would result in carbon neutral (or even negative, if any of the converted CO2 carbon breaks away from the O2 in the burning process as soot) any time power delivery.
Yes, you would be burning the methanol in an engine to turn a turbine but if the carbon for that process came from the atmosphere to begin with then who would be upset by that?
But selling it let you pocket a few bucks, so the choice was obvious.
They should tax half the carbon you extract as if it were mined, unless you sequester it instead.