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> Now spread that costs over a proper lifetime, calculate in the costs of storage and/or variable demand backup and the adjusted distribution infrastructure and don't ban things like fuel reuse technology to reduce waste at the behest of fossil fuel industry and it looks a lot better.

The link I posted is from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) published the Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) which uses LCOE. It doesn't include hydrogen/methane storage but we are talking 3 times the cost which leaves a lot of room to come out ahead.

> Is this in Arizona and the likes? I feel like America really need to get it's head out of it's ass and dis-incentivise living in deserts with water problems to boot as well as some other common sense things. The CO2 output per capita being twice that of the EU and a bunch of other countries and that after a whole lot of improvement on the US front makes it clear this is not just a developed world thing but rather that some core issues are not being looked at.

Um, like almost everywhere? Honestly, west coast places like SF/LA are pretty unique in not having as much variable temperatures. We definitely get heat waves here in the midwest and it is definitely not a desert.

And now that I think about it, if we are truly to decarbonize that includes heating and heat waves [0] would be childs play compared to polar vortexes [1]. Good luck building enough spare nuclear to heat the entire continent by 40-90 degrees.

[0]: https://cw39.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2021/06/NATL-HI...

[1]: https://mashable.com/article/polar-vortex-2021-cold-temperat...



>Good luck building enough spare nuclear to heat the entire continent by 40-90 degrees.

Which non carbon heating or energy source do you suggest? The US doesn't seem to be warming up to heatpumps much and it's not like those are grand in those extreme conditions. The insulation standards there from what i've heard and compared are still quite bad (Not helped by the fact that AC and pure heating solutions common involve lots of airflow)


I'm not suggesting we use a non carbon heating system. We already have methane furnaces all over the country, the storage for it, and the infrastructure to pipe it around. We just need to stop pulling it out of the ground and use electric -> methane power to gas which has a 51–65% efficiency range which combined with modern day furnaces that are 90+% efficient, is not too bad.


So they are still quite inefficient even if accept your efficiency range. Then there's the high costs associated with the catalysts or membranes, etc depending on what technology you use.

We're not even using pumped storage nowhere near enough where possible and it's the vast majority of all utility scale storage but the amount of people that somehow champion power to gas as this grand thing that's anywhere close to being able to compete with it at scale is staggering.




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