We all pay more for our electricity (which makes us use conscious).

I don’t know anyone who has gone off-grid as a way to lower their carbon footprint. It would be hard to do. One would need to live someplace with a lot of sunshine, wind, or micro-hydro potential.

I wouldn’t say that we’ve been hearing about better EV batteries for decades. We clearly produced much better and much cheaper batteries for portable devices (laptops, digital cameras, etc.), but I don’t think we’ve been pushing hard on EV batteries for all that many years.

I’m not predicting that we’ll see major announcements in the next 12 months, but I will not be at all surprised.

Thermal plants are heading toward bankruptcy. Someone is going to have to eat those losses. In some cases it will be shareholders and in some cases rate payers/taxpayers.

But the grid will abide. (Second time I got to use that today. ;o)

End-user solar will largely kill the previously profitable midday demand peak as it is doing in Germany. But utilities are going to be able to supply storage and backup generation at a better price than most end-users can.

Furthermore, most people aren’t going to be willing to run their own utility company. (I’ve been running one for over 20 years, trust me. Off-grid electricity is much more expensive than on-grid electricity. And a good deal more effort than automating your monthly payment with your credit union.)

We’ve got some tricky work to do during the transition away from fossil fuels. We’re probably going to have to pay some coal plants for capacity. That is, we’ll have to pay them something so that they can sit around most of the time idle, but be available during times of highest demand or if we have a big supply disruption.

Before it dies completely away, coal will be the third string bench warmer who gets paid just enough to keep him dressing out for the game. May never see any play time, but provides a level of security.

I can see NG plants being deep backup many years from now. Cheap to build. Cheap to maintain when not used. Eventually we might run them on biogas, but the small amount we would probably use them wouldn’t release significant amounts of CO2.

Money attracts a lot of activity.

There’s a tremendous amount of research and development happening right now with EV batteries. It’s very clear than the companies that can market a higher capacity battery at a decent price are going to make fortunes.

If someone releases an EV battery that stored 400Wh/kg for $160/kW they would be the new Microsoft in terms of wealth. That would give us a ~200 mile range EV for the cost of an ICEV. (Envia says they have that battery and GM is testing it on their tracks.)

There’s also a lot of research and development happening with grid storage. Ambri claims to have a “dirt cheap” liquid metal battery that will go into manufacturing in a few months.

If that’s the case then higher NG prices will drive implementation (along with wind and solar installation).

More activity in an industry generally means lower costs due to increased efficiency, more innovation and economies of scale.

(Nuclear is dead. Just not everyone realizes that yet. The corpse is still twitching.)

In an ideal world I’d like to see a very stiff tax on methane emissions, corresponding to its damages relative to CO2. But monitoring emissions is another matter (not necessary for carbon), so regulations and heavy fines for violations is probably the best we can hope for.

Oh, by the way, ‘nother topic… Since you’re a moderator here, have you seen this item? (http://grist.org/climate-energy/solar-panels-could-destroy-u-s-utilities-according-to-u-s-utilities/?utm_source=outbrain&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=outbrain-gristiest) That might be an interesting one to link to in the solar section. And it’s a fun read.

Yes, if we’re considering a 1:1 exchange of NG for coal.

But NG, being dispatchable, allows us to use wind and solar in large amounts and then NG as a fill-in. If, for example, we replace a coal plant with 50% wind, 20% solar and supply the last 30% with NG then we’ve cut the CO2/methane damage to 30% of what coal would have produced.

From what I understand, removal and use of CO2 is a non-starter because the market price of CO2 doesn’t cover (or even approach) the recovery cost. If it did, industry would already be doing it. At the quantities needed (and not re-emitted!) to make a noticeable dent in emissions, the price of CO2 would be indistinguishable from zero.

As an aside, let’s not be conned by fantasies about CO2 sequestration. That’s a myth promoted by the “clean coal” lobby, and I doubt it will turn into anything more than that. A few years ago I was in a seminar by a leading DOE researcher into CCS, where they’re test-injecting into deep basalt formations. I asked her how much of the net energy from a coal plant would be needed for cleaning, compressing, piping the CO2. She said, “Optimistically, 35%.” That translates into at least a 54% increase in coal consumption to generate the same amount of power (not to mention the cost of compressors, drills, pipelines). A great deal for the coal industry, along with $Bs in clean coal subsidies, but not for the rest of us. Even though gas makes cleaner exhaust, and the loss might be smaller, similar calculations would apply.

Not sure what you mean by using gas as a catalyst to produce larger amounts of hydrogen. We’re not going to get energy for nothing, and if we somehow only extract the energy from the hydrogen part of CH4, we give up a huge fraction of the energy in gas. If there were some non-magical way to react the C or CO2 and store it as a solid, someone would have figured it out long ago. The high energy density of hydrocarbons is directly related to the low energy and thus low reactivity of the reaction products, CO2 and H2O. You can’t burn either of them, and to react them into some other compound usually consumes energy.

Back to your idea of extracting and using CO2, it’s not going to happen on more than a microscopic scale because CO2 is an energy dead end and thus a waste product. You have to pay for a bottle of it, but only because of the cost of compressing, containing, and transporting it. The fact that there’s little discussion about isolating more of it is a sign that people are rational, not that they’re missing an opportunity.

That helps make storage more affordable.

Artificial photosynthesis doesn’t make use of excess renewable, I don’t think. What I’ve seen is a direct use of sunlight to gen hydrogen.

Storing energy via renewable electricity to crack water is an option, but probably won’t be cost effective.

We should know soon, or it’s possible we will know in a few months, if liquid metal batteries will be ‘for real’. Ambri is talking about beginning manufacturing in 2014. They have apparently moved to a better combination of materials from their original antimony and magnesium choices. Whether that means lower cost, more efficiency or both has not been stated.

With better storage we could start cutting back on NG usage. Hopefully we’ll have more affordable storage in five years or less.