Remember there is nothing “natural” about natural gas. It’s definitely not “greener” in any way.
The term natural gas should ideally be replaced with “fossil gas”, and a man in B.C. is fighting to change this in official documents. Article below.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/what-on-earth-natural-gas-fossil-1.7001520
Natural gas is primarily composed of methane, and has major climate implications. It’s a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, with greater ability to trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.
You kind of gloss over the issue there, and maybe its in the link or not, but it should be in your post.
Methane being a worse green house gas isnt an issue around the peaker plant. The output of the peaker plant is still CO2.
The problem with Methane is all the leaks that happen at the wells, and then the actual Methane gets into the atmosphere instead of the combustion byproduct CO2. And there are a lot of leaks.
It does burn cleaner though in terms of what else is put into the environment than other combusted sources, like coal.
I understand the desire for “fallback” methods of creating power when renewables aren’t generating, but I just hope the main goal of all this is building out PRIMARILY renewables with methane gas as backup ONLY. As battery tech improves and becomes cheaper, I hope we can shutter the gas plants permanently.
Batteries are already more cost effective than a new peaker plant. Its already happening.
Edit: i guess i should say, can be. It depends on the market and cost accessing peaker plant power, which can be very expensive.
