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Comment by zemvpferreira | Hacker News Reader

It's most certainly not, since for every kW of installed renewables another kW of gas capacity must be installed to compensate for intermittency.

That said, no reason why the original deal can't be extended to renewables, seems perfectly fair. It's to everyone's benefit that all methods of power generation be held accountable for all their costs.

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You know, for the last couple of months we learned quite a bit about the reliability of gas power.

It's not really that great.

> It's most certainly not, since for every kW of installed renewables another kW of gas capacity must be installed to compensate for intermittency.

Why? Built geographically decoupled production, look at past weather data and pick how many 9's up-time you want.

Then use storage and smart consumers to lower the requirements.

For national emergencies keep a fossil reserve or whatever, with that kind of usage power 2 gas should not even matter.

You can dream every solution you'd care to dream, but right now gas-backed solar is how it's done in europe.

Nuclear is also "gas-backed" in way. A stable energy grid is not something one can hand wave together.

Nuclear is reliable to a fault. It is rock solid. But it doesn't "go up" very fast - that is where you need gas support. Which is quite different from solar and wind, where you can't predict the ups and downs

Have you looked at France's grid recently?

In Germany it was backed by water power that could take most of the load at night so that the nuclear power plants could run continuously.

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