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Wind Power Is Cheaper Than Coal, Leaked Report Shows

Posted by Soulskill on from the tilting-at-coalmills dept.

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.

45 of 610 comments (clear)

  1. Too bad... by exploder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Too bad... by Immerman · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We could change that - it's just a pollution tax away.

      --
      --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
    2. Re:Too bad... by sumdumass · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Too bad... by thesupraman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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 ).

      In other words this is a fluff piece written by some pro-wind political pressure group with the intention of getting some good headlines and hoping no one actually looks at the numbers.

      Put another way, propaganda.

      Enjoy the lies. Pity that environmentalists so often have to resort to them - not many ideals on those idealists.

    4. Re:Too bad... by Luckyo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:Too bad... by Luckyo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:Too bad... by sumdumass · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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

    7. Re:Too bad... by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Take away the absurdities, and they've shown that nuclear is by far the most economical solution.

    8. Re:Too bad... by Stewie241 · · Score: 3, Informative

      See what you do to calculate the area of a square is you take the square of the length of one side. So 11 x 11, IIRC, is 121 square miles. 121 square miles * 640 = 77,440 windmills. So, you're right, it is a bit more than a square 11 miles on a side, but it's pretty close.

    9. Re:Too bad... by sumdumass · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    10. Re:Too bad... by durrr · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "This project was carried out and authored by Ecofys. "
      "Ecofys is a leading knowledge and innovation company in the field of renewable energy, energy efficiency and climate change."

      How surprising that a report written by a renewable energy company found out that renewable energy is best energy.

    11. Re:Too bad... by thesupraman · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This.

      Nuclear is safe and cheap - it has killed far less people than ANY other form of power generation per output (including wind and solar, due to the high incidence of installation fatalities).

      It has been politically buried in a mountain of oversight and penalty 'costs' for political reasons - basically a cost created by the cold war 'fear the enemies radiation!' propaganda that was brainwashed in to everyone.

      the REAL negative things about nuclear power these days are:
      The NRC, an organisation that has for far too long held back sensible improvements in this critical part of infrastructure.
      The old, outdated, and unnecessarily less safe reactors being kept live due to the political impossibility of replacing them with modern ones (and even THEN their safety history is pretty damn good compared to alternatives).

      Any TRUE environmentalist should be screaming at the top of their lungs, protesting in the streets, to have more nuclear power built and shut down the damn coal plants that ARE spreading radiation everywhere!

    12. Re:Too bad... by umafuckit · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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
    13. Re:Too bad... by Phronesis · · Score: 5, Informative

      we'll be looking at a full on runaway greenhouse effect such as devastated Venus.

      Nope. The Kombayashi-Ingersoll limit says that a Venus-style runaway greenouse is not possible on earth because the sun isn't bright enough unless you brought the albedo down below about 7%.

    14. Re:Too bad... by Cyberax · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Hmm.. Let's see. The Sun is getting hotter and the last time the concentration of CO2 was as high as it is now was about 20 millions years ago. At that time there were trees growing in Antarctica and the global temperatures were about 8C hotter than now. The seas were at least 30 meters higher.

      Oh, and since we're not planning to stop spewing CO2 any time soon, it's possible that we'll get its concentration as high as during the period when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and trees were growing near the poles. Are you sure that such sudden change won't overwhelm natural feedback mechanisms?

    15. Re:Too bad... by jcdr · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    16. Re:Too bad... by sumdumass · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And yet your energy costs have not gone down. A quick look shows yhe cost per kilowatt in germany is three times as much as the US and almost twice as expensive as france.

      But hey, as long as they increase your rates at a slower pace it means i'm wrong right? Here is a hint, 25 years ago, germany's eletrical costs were on par with the US. Rates have not gone down in the US. You suppliers are not passing all the savings down. They are banking most of it. BTW wind energy raw costs in the US is about 7-9 cents per kwh(adapted from Mwh). Or course there will be about 4 cents more by the time it reaches a house which is still a fraction of the average cost of electricity in Germany.

      You actually proved my point while feeling good about being raked over.

    17. Re:Too bad... by Phronesis · · Score: 4, Informative

      We're losing polar ice and there are other changes too. How much will that affect the albedo?

      Albedo is currently 30%. Losing ice cuts the albedo (this is known as the "ice-albedo feedback"), but not anywhere like from 30% to 7%. Clouds provide a lot of albedo and they're not going anywhere.

      55 million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum, the sun was almost as bright as today, there was about 4 times as much CO2 in the atmosphere as today (basically, there was a carbon infusion into the atmosphere roughly equivalent to us burning all known coal reserves), and there was no permanent ice on Antarctica or Greenland, but there was no runaway greenhouse effect. We can also calibrate the strength of the ice-albedo feedback from its contribution to Pleistocene ice age cycles, during which as much as 30% of the earth's land mass was covered with ice and snow.

      Don't get me wrong: Global warming is a very real and serious threat. But there is no plausible way it could possibly produce a boil-the-oceans-dry runaway greenhouse effect like we see on Venus. If you're looking for a good scientific treatment, see David Archer's textbook "Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast" for an introductory-level treatment or Raymond Pierrehumbert's book, "Principles of Planetary Climate" for a very rigorous calculus-based Ph.D. level treatment. Also, Andrew Ingersoll, who discovered the runaway greenhouse effect, has a good primer, "Planetary Climates." Realclimate.org also has a good short and clear treatment.

  2. Article ignores variability by steveha · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Article ignores variability by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 4, Informative

      There is a Norwegian-Danish link up though, and Denmark are currently running on more than a third wind power; actually the first 6 months of this year, they were over 40% wind power.

      --

      -WolfWithoutAClause

      "Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"
    2. Re:Article ignores variability by American+Patent+Guy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Of course, when you "distribute" your plants off-shore, you also need wires and supporting towers to transfer the electricity to the grid. (Science hasn't quite developed phasor transmission yet.) And when you factor in the "externalities" of building and maintaining that infrastructure (to get the power from where the wind blows to where people actually live), and the "externality" of power loss through the wires and transformers connecting those wind generators to the main grid, I'll bet the actual costs for wind-power aren't as favorable as you think.

    3. Re:Article ignores variability by WolfWithoutAClause · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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!"
  3. Re:as the birds go by MightyYar · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  4. Re:as the birds go by beernutmark · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  5. Diseconomies by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Diseconomies by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Diseconomies by joe_frisch · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

  6. Re:as the birds go by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!
  7. Re:I'm waiting for the doomsayers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Barton#Position_on_wind_energy

    In June 2010, Barton questioned the wisdom of deficit spending to fund an extensive national wind turbine energy generation grid. He said, "Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to wind energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about."

  8. Re:as the birds go by pkinetics · · Score: 4, Funny

    Depends on if it is a European or African swallow

  9. Getting better at it too by EmperorOfCanada · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. Read the Report by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Read the Report by SillyHamster · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Sooner or later, a transmission infrastructure upgrade will be cheaper than dealing with the rising fuel prices and external costs. I don't see how this could be possibly a matter of "if" rather than "when".

      If this happens, the transition will happen pretty naturally following the prices of energy/fuel.

      Trying to pre-emptively optimize for the "right" outcome ignores the risk of guessing the wrong new future energy tech.

    2. Re:Read the Report by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 4, Insightful

      And will that happen before, or after we find out how much the environment change will have cost us by then? That's the one skeleton in the closet that's being addressed by this, which many people seem to be constantly ignoring.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
  11. Study summary by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."
  12. Power Companies Don't Have Real Costs by Etherwalk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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*.

  13. Re:as the birds go by AK+Marc · · Score: 4, Funny

    Can you kill two birds with one coal?

    --
    Learn to love Alaska
  14. Re:as the birds go by I'm+New+Around+Here · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  15. Re:I'm waiting for the doomsayers by dryeo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  16. Re:as the birds go by dryeo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  17. Re:as the birds go by Petfish · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...

  18. Cheaper? Cheaper means only one thing. by thegarbz · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  19. Re:as the birds go by Euler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  20. Re:as the birds go by dbIII · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Heh. By golly, once it's in your agenda, whatever it takes, eh?

    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.

  21. as the birds go by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.