We’re still a long way from figuring out storage for renewables. Here in Ireland in winter we get weeks long periods of calm, cold, overcast weather where renewables generate almost nothing. There’s no known energy storage mechanism that can handle this, so we still have to burn fossil fuels. I don’t doubt we’ll figure it out, but I think skeptics still have a valid point on storage.
Yeah, it's a struggle. The upshot is most of the cost of combined cycle natural gas peaker plants are the fuel costs, so while storage solutions get figured out, or the renewable get massively overbuilt, you can maintain the FF infra for fairly cheap for the these days.
Incorrect.
most of the cost of peaker plants is the capital cost. The fixed costs are high and spread over few hours (peaker) or even no hours at all (just providing ready capacity if required e.g. ready in case of faults with generators or transmission).
The variable costs (fuel) are normally quite irrelevant.
Ireland already has the gas capacity built though. It provides about 50% of their power today, so they just need to phase it down and then out, not build it from scratch.
This is broadly true of most developed nations.
You can always produce hydrogen or methane and use ordinary gas turbines to turn it back to electricity.
In theory yes, but in practice we haven’t done it yet and until we have it’s reasonable to be skeptical about it.
They argued there would be issues with renewables unless there was a big uptake in storage. That was the key to making it all happen. Well now we have a big uptake in storage and it is starting to look like the future in that sense is very bright.
Scale is funny like that, it looks like it won't happen for the longest time and then it suddenly become ubiquitous. There is still a long way to go but improvements are happening fast.