Slashdot Mirror
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
To decry wind energy, saying we're slowing the rotation of the earth down or something.
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.
And I'd wager that coal - - kills birds, too.
Coal doesn't kill birds. People with coal kill birds . . .
. . . or should that be birds with coal kill birds . . . or people . . . ?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Pretty certain that Coal kills more birds than wind power
Is that better or worse?
Killing more birds sounds worse, unless wind turbines kill more endangered (or otherwise valuable) species.
In the past year, three birds have been killed by colliding with my office window. And that is only while I was in my office. In the long run, Darwinian evolution will solve this problem.
Depends on if it is a European or African swallow
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.
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.
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."
Last month I got a photo of a bird splattered into the side of my red house. No window for 2 meters. I'd upload it but this is /. not /. beta
Gently reply
Clean(er) coal is still mostly an idea, not yet commercially implemented (at least when talking about carbon sequestration in the US). A pretty good article is at National Geographic. It mentions that there is a plant under construction in Kemper County, Mississippi, that should capture more than half of its CO2 emissions and redirect them to an oil field. The project has suffered from cost overruns and delays (new tech, not horribly surprising). Besides sequestration, there is work being done on "gassification" (turning coal into a gas and cleaning it before burning it) and improving the combustion process itself.
Of course, you still have to get the coal, which can be nasty (see mountaintop mining and this article about environment impacts of coal mining).
Even as we are trying to sequester half of the carbon we generate when generating power from coal, the permafrost is melting, and according to that article, this could release about 190 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere.
So, yeah, we can use coal better, but it will cost a lot of money, which probably isn't going to happen without regulation and, subsequently, the recovery of any investment via higher prices for energy. Higher energy prices will doubtless generating much gnashing of teeth during an economy that, at least in the US, seems stuck in a slow, very slow, recovery. With the US Congress very likely to go to a Republican majority next month, the chances of any kind of CO2 regulation are slim.
Since when did that 'wisdom' imply that wind is more expensive than coal?
Wind was more expensive when wind plants ware scarce and 'expensive' to set up and had a relatively low yield.
Setting up a 25MW plant (what se build now) is cheaper then setting up 5 5MW plants.
It was a no brainer 25 years ago that wind will be in the end cheaper than coal.
Why is everyone 'playing surprised?'
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
certain based on what facts?
Half of all birds in the world die each year, that's a fact. Coal is not even on the list of what kills birds in this world, even if you imagine some avian cancer or mercury poisoning is caused by coal.
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*.
*sigh*
While there is an issue with wind turbines killing eagles it is not nearly as bad as you make it out.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/11/eagle-slaughter-wind-farms-kill-67-eagles-5-years/
Over a 14 year period all American wind farms killed a total of 85 eagles of which only 12 were bald eagles. The article does suggest the number could be much higher but saying 100 bald eagles in one year in one state is a gross over exaggeration.
Can you kill two birds with one coal?
Learn to love Alaska
Just a sec. Are you counting chickens raised strictly for slaughter?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Man, you have to stay out of your office. You are apparently drawing these creatures to you.
Go sit in the forest for a while, and let them settle on the tree branches around you.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
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
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.
OK, as long as they *selectively* kill birds.
I mean, if all they killed were pigeons, that'd be fine, right? We might even build more of them, even without the subsidies...
Turbines kill an insignificant number of birds by comparison with Windows. We need to get rid of Windows. Who knew? https://www.sciencenews.org/ar...
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.
When you drive the price of energy up so high it causes real pain.....then you'll learn what hate is. I'm all for solar and wind if they're competitive. I'm not for tripling my electric bill for some green religious jihad.
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?
Yup it's all liberal dis-information. Wind power is a joke and doesn't even work.
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.
The subsidies, tax breaks, etc that you're talking about? That's in the US. This is for the entire EU. But if you want to put it in US terms, maybe you should also recognize tax subisides given for oil exploration, oil logistics (keystone pipeline XL anyone?), public health concerns from smog and carbon monoxide, military protection of oil and liquified natural gas trade routes, military campaign to protect oil pipelines (Georgia most recently), cleanup efforts when some idiot decides it's a good idea to drill somewhere that no submersibles can reach, etc. In fact, the actual price of a gallon of oil in the US is somewhere in the range of $16 when all ancillary costs are factored in.
Turbines kill an insignificant number of birds by comparison with Windows .
We need to get rid of Windows . Who knew?
If Windows does that to birds, just think of what it's doing to the children!!!!! Microsoft should be tared and feathered for this!
Maybe we should use Linux.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
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...
... the Key dodge here is "when health impacts are considered"... but the thing is you can't know what the health impacts are of the coal industry. You can ASSUME those impacts. But you can't say that because there are 5 coal plants there are 522 incidents of lung infection. You can't know that. You could shut down all those coal plants and have the same number of lung infections or quadruple them and have no significant change.
The issue is complicated and people are going to get "emotional" or "political" about this ... I really don't care.
Here is where I am on this issue...
1. I am all in favor of renewables IF they are themselves produced renewably. That is, build your solar and wind power generators using solar and wind power. Ever note that a great many of these technologies are built using nuclear or coal power? I'm not asking that they locate their factories next to the production. If your industrial sector is by some coal power plants and you really have to use coal power... Fine. Buy energy credits from the renewable energy plants or something. I just find the hypocrisy of building solar on coal power to be a little odd when people keep telling me how great solar is and how terrible coal is... If solar is so great, no one has cheaper solar power then a solar panel factory. NO ONE has cheaper panels then them. Which means no one is in a better position to self generate using solar power then a solar panel factory. No one. And if they're not doing that... then I wonder if people are lying to me when they say solar is cheap. Because I'll tell you this... factories that produce coal generators are very happy to power themselves with coal power. Oil refineries are very happy to power themselves with oil. Nuclear reactor factories are very happy to power themselves with nuclear reactors. So why are not solar panel factories powering themselves with solar panels?
2. Any estimation of cost and subsidy has to take all the subsidies and costs into consideration. It is very common for people to cherry pick numbers that make their desired conclusion look more likely.
3. Solar and wind power are by their natures more defuse energy sources that are not as inclined to be centralized. To be truly useful both of these power generation methods needs to be decentralized... ideally to the consumer level. You might consider for example giving every resident a few solar panels to put on their roof along with the associated electrical hardware. Have them be owned by the power utility and let residents put the panels where they want so long as they get sun. Giant centralized plants are sensible with high density energy generation systems. Solar and wind are neither.
4. In respects to wind especially, you need to make these things more aesthetic. Unlike nuclear or coal you need thousands and thousands of these things over many miles. That means rather then one ugly building we're treated to thousands. And because of that you need to have some design flexibility. Now the way they're designed now mostly is to maximize efficiency and cost. Which is fine but it looks like what it is. If you instead put out some generalized design requirements and instead let home owners, towns, local communities decide how they want it to look then you might get wider adoption. Consider for example the windmills of Holland. Not only are they not an eye sore... they're a tourist attraction. Consider further the Hoover dam... tourist attraction... because its art decto stylings make for an attractive photo op.
5. Keep in mind that regardless of everything we need power. So if the renewables aren't up to the job right now... do not screw with power that is at this moment able to meet demand. Doing so will just drive up energy costs which mostly hurts poor people.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
That's pure foolishness. The owners of the power companies do not care where their power derives from socially. They care about making a profit for their shareholders. They do that either by charging their customers more, or by reducing their costs. Their rates are usually regulated by the government where they are located; that leaves reducing costs as the only realistic way to produce profits.
The power companies do not operate in your hypothetical "free market". They are restricted by the demands of their customers, by standards, by technological limitations, and by laws imposed upon them. The reason that power companies do not utilize solar power is mainly because a solar junction produces DC at about 1 volt. To efficiently transmit that energy across the miles of wires from the sunny parts of the world to the places people live requires AC at hundreds of thousands of volts. The conversion is possible (using a very high-current waveform generator), but it is not cheap to do.
Wind turbines, on the other hand, generate AC and can be synchronized to their connected grid just like any other power-generating turbine.
Your recitation of unprovable generalizations and your attempt to steer the discussion toward solar betrays your purpose against power companies: this article was a comparison solely between the costs of wind- and coal-sourced electricity. If you want to stick a solar panel in your back yard, then be my guest.
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.
Stop repeating this crap. Wind turbines are not a significant impact on bird populations compared to many other sources, and are not a serious concern except in areas where they are specifically likely to impact an endangered species. There are people out there with a significant financial incentive to convince you that wind power is bad for the environment, and it's a lie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power#mediaviewer/File:Bird_mortality.svg
Note that that's a log scale.
With harder birds that can break thru windows of course.
I get paid by the coal, oil and occasionally uranium mining industries but that doesn't stop me from being honest and admitting that there may be a niche for wind. I really do not get these fake conservatives that have decided they they want to lie and be unprofessional just to help me and others in the industry out.
It's pointless and they are just making themselves look like slimy weasels.
Cheaper implies less monetary cost. You can't simply go, coal bad, therefore more expensive, as a COST TO OUR HEALTH and have something where you can discuss the cost of producing electricity on a purely business level.
Nor can you predict how the future will be handled. You can't say it's cheaper because then we don't have to build and run the super earth air filter, as we might just die instead.
So no, cost wise, not cheaper. Heatlh wise, better for us.
At least in Germany buildings and structures with large glass panels have stickers depicting predatory birds on them so other bird would stay away.
Please don't talk about runaway greenhouse effects here on Earth. It really isn't possible.
Quick summary: for a runaway greenhouse effect, you need a big surface reservoir of some greenhouse gas (on Earth, water vapor). Theoretically, you increase the temperature a little, this vaporizes more of the gas, trapping more heat, which vaporizes more gas, and so on until the planet no longer has a radiative balance. Then things get a bit warm.
On Earth, the tropopause generally keeps water vapor near the surface; if water vapor rises to that point, it usually freezes and precipitates. This prevents it from building up in the upper atmosphere. One of the effects of CO2 on Earth is to cool the stratosphere, so ironically adding more of it could be moving us further away from a runaway greenhouse effect.
There is a vague possibility that we might make some lasting change to the climate, but probably not. We're still a few orders of magnitude away from the most drastic outgassings that the Earth has experienced. We're drastically compressing the timeframe of those events, but we will exhaust all fossil fuels long before we match the CO2 emissions of the largest LIPs. We can and seemingly will fuck up the planet for a geologic age, but the planet has recovered from worse extinction events before. We'll have to be satisfied with 90% of terrestrial life, I am afraid that the Ultimate Species Fuckup is beyond us.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Then easy to cite. Please do. Very interesting.
It is not that wind turbines aren't more dangerous than other sources, it is that they are dangerous to certain species such as bald eagles. Conservationists have even sued the government over it.
If God had intended chickens to live out a natural life-span, he would not have invented so many tasty recipes with them as the main ingredient.