I hope the tech in this (probably overly optimistic, sales pitchy) article works out because it's really hard to imagine northern latitude countries managing to move away from extracted fossil fuels without either something like this to bridge the non-electric energy gap (for heat) or nuclear getting a lot more acceptable/affordable.
We otherwise just do not have the tech to store energy on the scale necessary, as far as I can tell.
https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/solar-energy-solves-global-warming
@megmac I think it's an interesting argument for the form that excess solar energy is stored in. like, the $100k to built a capture plant that produces $150k of natural gas looks great but it ignores the $1m solar array that powers it which already produces $150k of electricity. But with government incentives to capture carbon instead of/in addition to using battery storage or pumped water storage or whatever, it's very appealing.
@atinyfairy I've always kind of found it funny that people who are in the die-hard "renewables but never nuclear" camp will paper over any deficiency in renewables with promises of storage and then insist that nuclear isn't viable because it can't be turned up or down.
But storage works both ways! You can use it to smooth out fluctuations by redistributing overloads or you can use it to supply peaks from an consistent average supply.
And in a northern climate the latter sounds a lot more viable to me than the former, because you ain't storing 6 months of winter heating energy in batteries, and I'm pretty sure you'd basically have to terraform my province to make pumped hydro work..
@megmac and even better if we have mixed solar/nuclear. instead of turning off the nuke plants during the day we could run then continuously and dedicate the "extra" energy to carbon capture. of course that assumes we actually decide to actually build the clean energy nuclear plants we've had for half a century that already solve the problem…