Turns Out Wind and Solar have a Secret Friend ... Natural Gas

Oil & Natural Gas / Gas Shales / Economics

Date posted: 08/12/16

Chris Mooney opines that in this time of ambitious plans for clean energy growth, two of the U.S. largest states by population, California and New York, have both mandated that power companies get fully 50% of their electricity from renewable sources by the year 2030. Only, there is a problem .. Because of the particular nature of clean energy sources like solar and wind, you can not simply add them to the grid in large volumes and think that is the end of the story. Rather, because these sources of electricity generation are intermittent... solar fluctuates with weather and the daily cycle, wind fluctuates with the wind, there has to be some means of continuing to provide electricity even when they go dark. And the more renewables you have, the bigger this problem can be. Now, a new study suggests that at least so far, solving that problem has ironically involved more fossil fuels, and more particularly, installing a large number of fast-ramping natural gas plants, which can fill in quickly whenever renewable generation slips. The new research, published recently as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, was conducted by Verdolini of the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change and the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in Milan, Italy, along with colleagues from Syracuse U. and the French Economic Observatory. In the study, the researchers took a broad look at the erection of wind, solar, and other renewable energy plants (not including large hydropower or biomass projects) across 26 countries that are members of an international council known as the OECD over the period between the year 1990 and 2013. And they found a surprisingly tight relationship between renewables on the one hand, and gas on the other. All other things equal, a 1% increase in the share of fast reacting fossil technologies is associated with a 0.88% increase in renewable generation capacity in the long term. But, nuclear power will replace gas sooner or later ...