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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.
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.
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.
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
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!"