California has gone from virtually non-existent solar to generating 14% of it's power in well under 10 years and the growth is accelerating. In the same time period, the amount of power generated by wind has more than doubled.
Given how much of California power generation is natural gas (nearly 50%), if we can move to a future where batteries aren't a solved economic problem but natural gas plants are used to provide supplemental power to "unreliable" renewables, that's still an absolute win.
That’s a small pilot plant, I did ask at any scale.
I know I’m being sceptical but CCS has been talked about in the UK for a long time and we haven’t been able to move forward on it for some reason. I now worry that it is mostly a distraction from other technologies and changes that we know will work.
Generating all of our baseload power with renewables isn’t exactly a more plausible short-term solution. The energy storage problem is outright enormous. We don’t know that any of it will work because we haven’t done any of it at scale, that’s why we still have the problem.
Though you would want to use cheap, non-hydrocarbon-based electricity to do this in the first place. But this does provide a mechanism for safe, civilized countries to have nuclear power and essentially export their energy to less secure countries we may not trust with that technology.
Given how much of California power generation is natural gas (nearly 50%), if we can move to a future where batteries aren't a solved economic problem but natural gas plants are used to provide supplemental power to "unreliable" renewables, that's still an absolute win.