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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.
and when wind varies you need to have other types of power (such as natural gas) ready to pick up the slack.
Citation needed. Plenty of people live off grid, and when the sun don't shine and the wind don't blow, they live without. In a commercial setting this already exists, it's called load shedding. It is practiced in a bunch of countries with large hydroelectric capacity; when the supply of energy gets low, the price gets high, when the price gets high companies like Aluminum smelters shut off.
Large refridgeration companies (cool stores) have enough thermal mass to hold off refridgeration for 48 hours, and there are plenty of technologies designed to extend this by pre-cooling storage tanks in the foundation and returning the heat to the storage tanks (using up the stored thermal gradient) to maintain adequate temperature in the cool store.
For most of the large energy consumers (residential electricity usage is a small slice), it is more efficient to store energy in heat reservoirs (when it's being used for process heat or cooling) or to time shift energy consumption (when it's not) than it is to store it in electrical storage systems.
Home heating and cooling too can be managed using inexpensive thermal reservoirs, though it's kind of a moot point, because there is nearly nowhere where home heating and cooling is necessary and not a result of poor thermal design of the structure and control system.
Unfortunately our system of economics doesn't capture these diseconomies.
Europe (the subject of this report) has a system of carbon credits specifically designed to capture these externalities. Unfortunately, the European carbon credit market was corrupted and diluted by politicians.
wow I am shocked, a report written by a renewable energy consultancy group and surprise surprise it says renewable energy is cheaper by including a whole raft of external costs.
Economics has the concept of "externalities" - basically effects of an activity that are not captured in its production costs. These can be negative (like pollution) or positive (like increasing productivity from a transit system).
One of the primary jobs of governments is to help correct the effects of externalities through regulation and taxes. The particular problem here is that the externalities (for CO2) are global, but the governments are local. This makes proper taxation / regulation difficult. If a government taxes industry to account for global pollution, but if other governments do not, that will tend to drive industry to non-regulated and likely dirtier locations (resulting in MORE pollution not less). It may be possible to fix this with import taxes on these goods, but that gets into the very difficult and political world of international trade regulations.
Not saying it can't be done, but its tricky.
They do take that into account. Its called operating expenses. No one mines the coal or natural gas and transports it for free.
Of course the report- at least as far as the sumery is concerned placed an arbitrary value on some objects like enviromental damage and health that you really cannot quantify. Especially health- their taxes go into the same pool as everyone elses and that is just how socialized medicine works- you all share the cost. So there really isn't a health cost that can be figured outside the costs of actual treatment but thats already paid by taxes.
Now they can do something about this if they want. They can pick arbitrary amounts to recover and increase taxes on those power plants. Of course that cost will just get passed to the consumers and even if they did use more wind, they will more than likely keep the excess. If joe blow charges $50 and i make the same product for $10, i'm still charging $49 or $50 dollars because there is no real competition. You just pay more and i profit more. That's how life works.
Not only that, but they actually stack the deck from the other side as well by assigning penalties to "old investments made under non-liberalized investment regime" (i.e. if you had a plant built in the 70s, they add huge costs because they can't accurately evaluate the values of government support). Finally they count the plants that are nearing end of life as a huge cost burden on things like coal because of the sheer number of the plants.
Architecture is also starting to consider the problem. Turns out it isn't that hard to make windows that aren't as attractive to birds and some jurisdictions are now mandating more bird friendly design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I'm actually reading the report right now and my jaw is literally lying on the floor. They openly admit that they have no clue how much Nuclear actually cost, but they estimate, and I kid you not, that "total investment support for coal, nuclear and hydropower capacity in 2012 is estimated between 3 and 15 billion in 2013 euros.
Then they "weight the nuclear" because "average historic support for nuclear generation capacity is higher than that of coal and hydro".
Basically, they have an error margin of half a fucking order of magnitude and then they weight it against nuclear just to be on the safe side.
No wonder they got the conclusions stated, and no wonder that this report isn't released. It's utterly absurd in its current state. I suspect that this is interim because this is what pro-wind lobby came up with, and next there'll be a sanity check to get rid of the biggest points of idiocy to make it look at least remotely feasible.
You mean cheaper for the supplier. It won't get passed to the consumer. Modt existing coal plants will be used until their end of life. The peasants would revolt if they were taxed enough to make the savings from wind strong enough to abandon functional coal or gas plants with all the sunk costs.
Another problem, some quick math showrs the scale we are looking at. I saw where a modern wind turbin can poeer the eqivilant of 500 homes. Germany has somethong like 40.076 million homes/households. Thats about 80,000 windmills needed for germany's residential power alone. Witha blade radius avraging 65 meters or ~213 feet, we can see the space needed is going to be huge before we even get to powering busyness and industry
just to put this in context:
People eat 8 billion chickens in the US per year.
Number of birds estimated killed by windfarms is well under 1 million.
So I guess if they 'don't go to waste' then society doesn't care much.
I have a problem with that way of thinking.
You see, you didn't build that. Other people did. What i mean is you are benifiting from cheaper costs passed along over the years so if you recover anything, you would be responsible for the excess costs. Or in other words, it all that costs had been built in from the start, the costs would have been somewhat prohibitive to have the advancements in life that we do today.
So those costs are accounted for in cheaper energy and a better life that had they always been accounted for. And we know it would have restricted use in the past specifically because the intention in the present is to restric usage. Alternative forms of energy in the past simply wouldn't hold a candle to the capabilities of today so it would just be a rich mans domain. That is likely yhe outcome of trying to impose it now anyways.
Whilst I agree with you in principle, "half a billion years" is not a unit of mass and most plants and trees that have existed didn't turn into coal. I'm not being pedantic, the way your post is written emotively implies that a substantial proportion of all the plant biomass that has existed was locked up as coal. This isn't true. The fossil fuel carbon pool is only about twice the size of the terrestrial biosphere, which re-circulates comparatively quickly. Thus, the carbon from most ancient plants got recirculated and didn't get locked up as coal. In fact, both fossil fuel and biosphere carbon pools are dwarfed in size by the carbon pool present in limestone (so fossilised marine organisms), there's also a vast store in the oceans. Look up the carbon cycle on the Wikipedia.
soylentnews.org
And too bad they include completely made up additional costs to nuclear (like a cost of heat production - complete BS, and cost of using up uranium resources, when in fact reprocessing reduces that to almost zero very quickly )
Actually the peer reviewed science shows that nuclear energy has no net energy return. What this means is every dollar spent on nuclear energy is wasted. The study uses industrial standards for process measurement as a basis.
Enjoy the lies. Pity that environmentalists so often have to resort to them - not many ideals on those idealists.
I don't think this is a matter of 'environmentalists' anymore, our society has some severe structural issues. If we don't solve them the future of the human race will become very bleak indeed.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Partly, but it's not enough.
When the wind blows very strongly, Denmark already, even now, generates more than 100% of their national electricity demand. That's because wind can vary by a factor of 3 or so above the average; so once you get to 30% or so, when there's strong winds over the whole country, it completely dominates.
Meanwhile, Norway has a lot of hydroelectricity. So when the wind blows hard they export the excess to Norway, and Norway shuts down their hydroelectricity- it holds back its water temporarily. When the wind drops they turn the hydroelectricity back on more and power Denmark off the hydro with the water they've saved. The overall result is a very even power supply, and no carbon produced.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"It's actually not a lie to say that the total cost of nuclear production in unknown, as the number will only be known in about 1 million years scale in the future when the last isotope will finally be in range with the natural toxicity level. Most of the dangerous nuclear mass wast on the planet is not even close to be stocked in a final facility and most of the plans to do it are still uncertain in time, reliability, and total cost. Add to this that the deconstruction in good condition of a nuclear reactor has never be in range of what was planned. Finally add to this the over scale cost of a few major catastrophic nuclear events per century...
I don't know how people think about nuclear production in the USA, but in EU it's clear that more and more people are aware that nuclear production is a very complex subject that deal with very high amount of money up to the point that something more simpler to manage in might be preferable.