1、 itif.org Why Wind and Solar Need Natural Gas:A Realistic Approach to Variability ROBIN GASTER|SEPTEMBER 2024 Wind and solar power will replace consistently dispatchable electricity from fossil fuels with variable and more unpredictable clean energy.Seasonal shifts and annual variations cannot be ha

2、ndled with batteries or other proposed storage solutions like hydrogen.Natural gas will have to bridge the gap for many decades.KEY TAKEAWAYS Solar and wind are growing fast and rapidly displacing coal on the grid.But they are inherently more variable sources of energy;as the grid becomes more depen

3、dent on them,it will become potentially less reliable.Seasonal storage technologies such as hydrogen,pumped hydro,and compressed air are not realistic alternatives.More nuclear power could reduce the scale but not solve the problem.Only natural gas can guarantee reliability during the green transiti

4、on.Regulators must help gas transition from always-on baseload power to usually off capacity insurance.Existing combined-cycle plants and single-cycle peaker plants can do that if they are operated(and funded)to do so.DOE must help develop seasonal storage technologies for the future grid.Since they

5、 wont be deployed for decades,DOE has time to address the entire innovation cycle for these technologies,and should now be focusing on earlier-stage R&D.Federal and state regulators along with large companies and other stakeholders should help develop the advanced modeling that will be needed,along

6、with expanded data collectionincluding much extended meteorological data.DOE needs a new Office of Energy Variability to provide an institutional locus for long-term strategy and implementation and to implement a new funding focus on earlier-stage technologies now,and demonstration and scale-up prog