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Wind Power Now Cheapest Energy In UK and Germany; No Subsidies Needed
Socguy writes: Bloomberg reports wind power has now crossed the threshold to become the cheapest source of energy in both the UK and Germany. This is notable because it's the first time this has occurred in a G7 country. In the U.S., wind and solar are still massively overshadowed by the power generated from fossil fuel plants, but the percentage is creeping up. It's gotten to the point where it's starting to affect the lifetime profitability of new plants.
Yeah, yeah, call me a skeptic but I want to see the costs associated with actual power generation as opposed to the line items for punitive regulation.
Since solar and wind power commonly still rely on gas and coal for backup power generation, as such in the United States, the total cost to maintain the fossil fuel plants has to be considered when calculating the real benefits of renewables. Sorry, no fuzzy math allowed! You can spin and data mine the numbers for renewables all you want but science and math are absolute. ; )
Speaking of renewables in the U.S. why is hydro never mentioned when discussing renewables?!?
Make a turnstile for the lobbyists and use it to generate energy. Green and limitless.
And you've managed to make junk food (HF Corn Syrup) cheaper than fresh food; at market interference goes we've still got a lot to learn to be half as retarded as that.
wind's capacity factor has risen from 32% to 37%. Even more interns of percentage gains, solar's capacity factor has risen from 16 to 20% in that same time frame.
Which is still pretty low, and is why you need to couple expansion of wind and solar with a non-carbon-generating power source with a high capacity factor, such as hydroelectric or nuclear. And nuclear is a lot safer and more environmentally friendly than hydro.
UK power is expensive for a variety of reasons. We pay a ridiculous amount for nuclear, and don't make good use of our excellent wind resources. The big energy suppliers do the minimum possible to meet their legal obligations, in an attempt to force the government to pay them to build new capacity with tax money and bill increases.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I manage utilities at a major facility in the U.S. and our annual power costs average $12,000,000 to $14,000,000. Our avgerage rate is 5.3 times less than the average rate in Germany. If we were subject to such rates, I'm not sure that the industry would survive and even if it did, it would be at much higher costs to consumers and at a much lower scale. This would also have a disastrous impact on the number of jobs the facility provides, which is currently around 64,000. The progress that has been made with other forms of power generation is certainly exciting, but we are a long way and several major breakthroughs from being able to make any reasonable argument that wind and solar can compete with gas, coal and nuclear production capacities and costs. Articles like this one tend to ignore a lot of realities and draw conclusions that the data does not support.
This will be ridiculously easy to evaluate. If the article is true and wind is less expensive, then it will attract private investment money and a lot of it. Investments in wind will far outpace investments in other kinds of power generation (coal, nat gas, nuke, etc). And it will do so without assistance from the government or any other agency via subsidies or other legislation that encourages one technology over another.
Is that happening? No. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Thus far, without government subsidies and diktats, the wind power industry can hardly survive on its own.
As always, follow the money.
Wind is not a positively dispatchable power source. A wind turbine is not a functional substitute for a nuclear, hydroelectric, gas or coal station, all of which can produce power *when asked to do so*.
Grid-clearance auctions and other market pricing mechanisms VALUE positively dispatchable power at several times that of wind. Forget COST for a minute and think about VALUE to grid operations. Here in Ontario wind is paid a CAD$135 feed-in-tariff when the average production power VALUE is more like CAD$25. (Yes we are a slightly extreme case..)
Statistics like LCOE are just accounting games, that do not include grid-operational factors.
Photovoltaic ("solar") power may have a role to play, but the laws of our universe completely preclude the possibility of wind power ever being a useful, practical, economic contributor to large national grids; EVER. It's not even a remote possibility. On a little island somewhere, maybe.
The article is written by no-nothings in the enthral of environmentalists (i.e. no-nothings).
The blind leading the blind.
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Mike
-- Mike Greaves