Why would we invest in and build more very-high carbon systems like fracked natural gas when we have so many incredible low-carbon resources around like solar, geothermal, tidal, hydro, nuclear, and wind!? This seems really backwards to me considering the gravity of the climate situation.
Your parent already said why. The ability of gas plants to quickly adjust to changing loads is one of the things enabling those solar, tidal, and wind plants to be on the grid. Nuclear, hydro, and geothermal are great for baseline load, but adjust very slowly to changing load requirements.
Gas is filling a legitimate technical gap right now within the power grid, bridging between slow baseline plants and unpredictable renewable sources.
Even ignoring that we have a well known, much more renewable option on the table (nuclear), it is a technical gap that is also rapidly shrinking from advancements in storage tech (batteries and hydrogen fuel cells).
> Nuclear, hydro, and geothermal are great for baseline load, but adjust very slowly to changing load requirements.
Hydro adjusts very fast, it's literally just letting more water through. Nuclear is slower, but since its fuel costs are so low, you can typically just run it at full power all the time. Of course, with this approach you'll be overproducing, but with efficient spot market for electricity, you'll have businesses taking advantage of this cheap energy during overproduction to generate the necessary load.
It depends, pumped storage can be designed to react very fast. In particular pumped storage plants which were conceived specifically to alleviate surge demand can spend a little bit of energy now to stand ready, no longer storing further energy but with their turbines now "spinning in air" the generator is rotating with no load and then when you actually need that power you drop water through to spin it instead, 16 seconds from zero to 6 x 300MW turbines = 1.8GW at Dinorwig station in Wales.
Gas likewise needs to consider this at design time. The most efficient possible closed-cycle gas turbine setup may take hours to be prepared and spin back up from zero, but obviously you would not choose this configuration if your intent was to use this station to handle surges. Britain's fleet of closed-cycle gas turbine power stations (in the same network as Dinorwig) frequently ramp up and down a dozen GW in an hour across the country.
BTW Dinorwig's fast start isn't really there to manage surges, that's a convenient happenstance, nobody was worried about a duck curve from solar power when it was built. It's there because it's a Black Start facility. Most power stations need outside power to start, it's just easier and they're connected anyway, Dinorwig was chosen to be able to start from nothing if the grid fails, so in that sense it's like the box of matches by the furnace, just in case.
You need some generation source that can quickly be brought online when needed, e.g. to meet peak demand for a few hours a day during extremely hot (or cold) weather, or when it's not windy/sunny.
Natural gas power plants are cheap to build and significantly cleaner than coal plants currently in operation. Nuclear is a fantastic option that I strongly support, but building reactors is a very expensive and multi-year process (if you can even get approval for it).
NG is not the endgame solution, but it is an immediately available solution to fill that gap until grid scale battery technology and sufficient renewable or nuclear capacity comes online.
That would be great. Episode 3 of Netflix's documentary on Bill Gates [0] that gets into his efforts to develop and deploy new reactor tech. While it only presents a small piece of the picture, it at least touches on the political climate surrounding nuclear energy. Worth a watch.
Nuclear is only expensive due to NIMBY regulation and lack of economies of scale. Look to South Korea to see how perfecting a plant design can dramatically lower cost.
The first thing we need to do is reverse the devolution of local control in the United States. If any random neighborhood council can block nuclear development then we aren't going to get anywhere.
