Thanks to continuously declining costs, a hybrid renewable electricity generation system that combines wind, solar, and storage could become competitive with the cheapest fossil fuel electricity in the United States—combined-cycle natural gas generation, an MIT professor suggests . John Deutch, an Institute Professor at MIT, has recently presented a study, ‘Demonstrating Near Carbon Free Electricity Generation from Renewables and Storage’, at an energy seminar at Stanford University. According to Deutch, the best way to see if the hybrid electric systems (HES) of wind, solar, and storage could compete in costs with natural gas-fired electricity generation is to organize a large-scale demonstration to show if those HES could meet electricity demand of a relatively large service area “rather than rely on government sponsored large scale demonstration projects or regulatory mandates compelling deployment of storage.” “Uncharacteristically I have been an optimist—I am an optimist—about this, and I believe we are very […]