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Wind Power Is Cheaper Than Coal, Leaked Report Shows
merbs writes: A leaked report shows wind is the cheapest energy source in Europe, beating the presumably dirt-cheap coal and gas by a mile. Conventional wisdom holds that clean energy is more expensive than its fossil-fueled counterparts. Yet cost comparisons show that renewable energy sources are often cheaper than their carbon-heavy competition. The report (PDF) demonstrates that if you were to take into account mining, pollution, and adverse health impacts of coal and gas, wind power would be the cheapest source of energy.
Too bad the operators of coal plants don't have to take all that into account.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
The article discusses wind power vs. coal and other types of power purely on the basis of cost, with absolutely no discussion of reliability.
If wind power is as cheap as he claims, then with a reliable storage technology wind would be a total no-brainer. But as it is, wind can only be part of a strategy. You can't count on wind for base load, and when wind varies you need to have other types of power (such as natural gas) ready to pick up the slack.
I'm hoping that the Ambri liquid metal batteries will do everything that Professor Sadoway claims. If so, they will change everything, and I will be cheering for more wind and solar. Until then, wind power only can serve as a niche producer.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
It's true that they kill birds. But so do cars and skyscrapers. And I'd wager that coal - between the waste disposal, emitted mercury, and mining - kills birds, too.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Yep. Pretty certain that Coal kills more birds than wind power. It's just that the birds that coal pollution kills are not killed at the site of the coal plant but all over the globe.
Unfortunately our system of economics doesn't capture these diseconomies.
Imported oil is another one. If you factored in the cost of political and military involvement in the middle east the price of oil would look very different.
Fuck autorefresh.
I would think a whole other factor is that when wind turbines are new to an area the expertise in putting them up and maintaining them would be low; thus the costs would be a bit higher. But after a decade or so of experience that the local talent would be getting better and better at selecting, installing, and maintaining the turbines and associated electrical infrastructure.
This would be on top of the fact that the turbines themselves are becoming cheaper and better with their nearly continuous improvements. So for anyone making decisions on future projects these numbers would not only be getting more reliable but could end up not being optimistic enough. Whereas with more mature technologies like coal the numbers are going to simply be the numbers.
The study was performed by Ecofys, a renewable energy consultancy, and the cover sheet comes with disclaimers about its accuracy.
The actual report is more interesting than the articles that hype its findings. The core results are seen on page 36 (PDF Sheet 53).
You will find that there are a lot of assumptions. In particular, they place a great cost factor on "depletion of energy resources". That single adder more than doubles their cost for nuclear. The explanation is that this is the cost of using up our uranium supplies. This is on top of the cost of uranium, already included elsewhere. If you read enough youll find that they just made a big assumption and don't yet really have a basis for it. Its quite convenient for them to make an assumption that magically brings nuclear up to their derived cost for solar. Of course, even as assumed, that cost could be mostly eliminated by reprocessing. They also place a cost on "heat production".
There are no cost considerations included for reliability, intermittancy and variablility. Nor direct infrastructure costs associated by technology, such as the need to add new transmission lines to accommodate wind. In fact, that is probably the biggest cost factor left out of the wind result. Section 3.4 talks about trasmission infrastructure. I'll paraphrase.. "we ignored it because it was too hard to figure out". Another nice convenience for them.
Taken at face value, if I'm a renewables guy looking at this report, I'd have to question why more money goes in to solar than wind.
Wind was cheaper if you added costs to coal for Global Warming (a large cost), for depletion of energy resources (a medium cost), and in the third category (a small cost even when all elements are totaled) "human toxicity, agricultural land occupation, water depletion, metal depletion, ecosystem toxicity, radiation, acidification and eutrophication."
Interestingly, they also included ozone depletion as an external cost. I didn't realize the ozone layer was affected by coal plants, but apparently it is.
To calculate the damage caused by Global Warming, they relied on some other papers published on the topic. I wasn't able to access those papers, so that is where my summary will end.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
... for ALL sources of energy, do we calculate cost, from cradle to grave?
For instance, take wind (could be solar, thermal, and all others).
How do we produce the components that make up the turbines and masts and blades and everything else that is needed? Doesn't that genesis start with mining raw materials and doesn't that process involve fossil fuels just for manufacture? What about the space the turbine masts (solar panels, thermal mechanisms, wires, cables, etc.) occupy? What machinery do we use to dig holes and erect them? Are they fossil fuel driven?
For any source like wind, or solar or thermal and others, what are the costs of disposal?
As a physicist, the law of conservation tells me we are never going to get something for nothing.
It's nice to talk about how well an existing wind turbine works, but I suspect the energy we invest in creating, and disposing of, them is more than the energy we get out of them.
However, I don't know that.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
If this author were correct, the power companies would already be rushing to build wind-driven turbines. They already have people carefully weighing the costs and benefits of each power-generation method. When I see wind-driven turbines appearing on the windy parts of my horizon, then I'll believe that wind is cheaper than coal.
You are forgetting the major factor of externalized costs. Processes have costs that are internal so they have to be paid for by the owner, and external so they get paid by someone else. Pollution is a major source of externalized cost in conventional power generation.
The power company doesn't have to pay for those costs, but society as a whole does, for example in asthma treatments and deaths, or likely in certain kinds of cancers. So the power company will do the thing which is cheaper for *them* but more expensive as a *whole*.
Skyscrapers also interfere with wind. On the other hand, we've removed many a tree that used to interfere with the wind
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Cheaper means only one thing. How much is my electricity bill at the end of the month.
What? You want me the end user to be responsible for the carbon emissions of my energy use? I'm perfectly fine with that ... as long as it's as cheap as it can possibly be.
Ok I may sound like a troll, but the reality is that is exactly how people think. Our local energy utilities have often provided split bills. For a little extra money you can fund a separate unit that is monitored by the government as not for profit, and that fund offsets the cost differences between dirty and clean energy. I bet you can imagine how much of a voluntary uptake there is on people being charged 5c/kWh more.
Wind energy subsidies amd tax breaks are miniscule compared to those provided to fossil fuels. What fox news incubation tank did you climb out of?
Heh. By golly, once it's in your agenda, whatever it takes, eh?
Giant, spinning blades of doom. But that's fine, because liberals like it, because conservatives hate it. Unless it's off the Massachusetts coast. I guess I'm not sure.
Of course they kill birds; they're giant spinning blades of doom, set up in such a way as to maximally extract energy from the air. Birds exist in the air. Therefore, if you're a bird, and you live there, sooner or later, you're likely to get extracted.
But fuck 'em. Price of Progress, eh?
Nuke plants, I would argue, are just tiny little concrete domes by comparison, and birds are free to nest and live among any nooks and airspace they might find. Not to mention the zero carbon. Energy, already stored here by past supernovas. All the energy you want, nobody and no creatures have to die, and the land looks nice with this little white building on it. I won't even go into the fact that we need a few just to burn up the waste we already have, since it can't be stored.
But keep justifying giant, spinning blades; stretching as far as the eye can see...
And it really pisses me off when such "whatever it takes" political losers pollute this site and attempt to blame their end justifies the means bullshit on others. Pretending to be far too stupid to have any sense of scale (giant, spinning blades; stretching as far as the eye can see) is an added touch that makes me despair that we've wasted a generation and not protected them from weasels with propaganda.
When did this place turn into an anti-technology site for idiots who wallowed in student politics and never grew up?
Why do "conservative" losers who make fun of others interest in wildlife conservation suddenly pretend to get worried about a trivial number of birds running into a couple of thousand windmills spread over a vast continent? Fuck the tendency to treat various bits of technology as proxies for political parties - stop being cowards and address the politics directly on sites dedicated to such a thing and please leave this place as somewhere to discuss the technology on it's own merits.