The government has made it clear that the new projects must be coal, gas, batteries or pumped hydro to be eligible for the government underwriting.
It will take longer to rotate passenger vehicles and light trucks away from gasoline and onto other alternatives: natural gas, batteries and fuel cells.
Under the NEG, a percentage of electricity must come from sources described as "dispatchable" - coal and gas, batteries or pumped hydro.
Natural gas and battery storage have grabbed headlines and investor attention, but the cheapest source of flexibility is actually customer demand itself.
Assuming continued cost declines in wind, solar, and batteries, and with natural gas and batteries filling the other 20% of the resource mix, CPI finds this theoretical system has sufficient flexibility to match supply and demand in each hour of the year at the same price ($70/MWh) as a system supplied by 100% natural gas.
Providing spinning reserve burns substantial amounts of fuel, usually natural gas, but batteries could do the same work with no pollution, experts say.
Like others who bought into the all-electric idea, he has since scrambled to cut his dependence on the grid, turning to stop-gap solutions like portable cookers that used replaceable gas cannisters, batteries and even candles.
"While gas and batteries both have an important role to play, pumped hydro provides relatively low-cost storage and can run for extended time frames to match volatile supply with volatile demand," Taylor said in a speech in November.
However, on average, electricity from a solar array in the United States is still about twice as expensive as electricity from a power plant fired by natural gas and that's not accounting for the cost of backup natural gas generation, batteries, or other storage systems needed with intermittent sources such as solar and wind.
