Coal has put their energy into creating and supporting the Tea Party and some of the most extremely right winged Republicans. The country, in general, has gotten fed up with the far right. Even seniors are deserting the Republican party.

Oil is no position to stop EVs. There are too many organizations, universities and corporations developing batteries. Car companies don’t really care what propels their cars, they just want to sell cars.

Coal companies will go broke. The smart ones will move what capital they can to other activities. The dumb ones will go bankrupt. We’re in line to see a massive drop in US coal consumption over the next 2-3 years with at least half of our coal burning plants closing.

Oil companies have a good 20 years more of selling their product. It will take at least that long to get most of the ICEVs off the roads and replaced with EVs. And the smart oil companies will start moving their capital to other activities along the way.

Nothing is going to stop rooftop solar. Once we bring the cost down to Germany’s price we will experience a tremendous solar boom in the US. Nothing is stopping wind, we’re installing a lot and starting to install off-shore.

Very quickly renewables will have more political power than fossil fuels.

By 2016 we are likely to have affordable 200 mile range EVs and liquid fuel will be used only in older vehicles.

I use the term “bridge” for NG because I view it as a bridge we can use to get us off coal. It can be used to fill in around wind and solar while we wait for better storage to come to the grid.

I’m using the term in about the same way as Ross, but I accept NG as a necessary evil much like chemo and radiation for cancer treatment. I’ll take a modest amount of NG use over a larger amount of coal use if the net GHG result is less.

The real extent of methane leakage is still very much under debate as far as I can tell.

If you’re going to run the H2 plant intermittently using only surplus electricity there’s going to be a lot of idle hours. In fact, your H2O cracker might sit idle all summer long.

During windier parts of the year you’d probably only run at night and you’d likely be in competition with EV charging.

But we will still encounter times when the Sun isn’t shining and the wind not blowing. We’ll need some sort of fill in. Later on that will probably be storage and possibly biogas but we have neither on line right how.

What we do have is NG capacity. So that leaves us with a choice. Do we use 100% nasty coal or “40%” nasty natural gas?

I really dislike NG, but I can’t find a reason to dislike it more than I dislike coal. So I’ll settle for a lesser amount of NG over a larger amount of coal. While I wait for better storage to become available.

If we need to get rid off fossil fuels, the heating sector needs to be electrified anyway and this increases the demand response capability tremendously without having to worry about any new electricity storage.

In addition, the car sector also needs to be electrified and this also increases the demand response capability without having to worry about any new electricity storage.

Last but not least: Wind and PV can fortunately easily curtail their production if necessary and slightly overbuilding Wind and PV is easy and cheaper than investing in additional storage which doesn’t have a 100% efficiency anyway.
(Example: Germany had too much Windpower last Xmas and had to reduce wind power production for a few hours. So what, that’s less than 0.05% of their yearly production.)

How about calling it a fill-in bridge while we wait for better storage? ;o)

I think its more common among the fossil fuel shills to refer to bridge fuel with the argument that we can burn gas instead of coal on the way to getting to renewables.

But that’s not how a bridge fuel works. A bridge fuel fills in the gaps when wind and solar aren’t producing.

Figure that the wind blows in good sites more than 50% of the time. Call it 50%. And the Sun shines, on average, about 20% of the time. That’s 70%, take away 10% for when wind and Sun overlap.

Now we need a fill-in, a bridge for the other 40%. At least until we’ve got storage. 40% of 77% is 31%. By moving from coal to wind + solar + NG we’d end up with about one-third as much ‘bad’.