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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.
No subsidies are needed when you internalize the costs of pollution associated with fossil fuel power plants.
They're very reliable. Whenever the sun shines or the wind blows, they work.
The word you're looking for is "intermittent" and that's an entirely different (and already solved) problem.
You raise a valid point. Yes, it would be nice if those costs were taken into account, but "We don't know all the costs therefore it's a bad idea!" is not a strong argument unless we truly know very little. Do you have any data to suggest that the backup costs are significant relative to the costs of the generated solar and wind power?
While we are on the subject of "things we don't know about the cost of solar and wind", here are some more questions that I'd like to see answered:
Are the fossil fuel plant maintenance costs simply the costs we already have for our existing fossil fuel plants? Is it possible that wind _lowers_ the maintenance costs of fossil fuel plants relative to their current levels? (If fossil fuel plants get less use, wouldn't they require less maintenance?) If wind and solar plants are distributed across the country, how much variation in total output capacity is there? (And by extension, how much fossil fuel backup capacity is really needed?)
In short, yes, you have brought up a cost that is not included in the analysis. However, there are many benefits and costs that are not included in the analysis. The math will always be "fuzzy" because no models include everything. Demanding that is unreasonable. As they say, all models are wrong, but some are useful.
Physics gets in the way and thermal power generation is at its best when large. Nukes are a special case where all that exotic stuff required needs to be done in bulk to justify the infrastructure needed to get any of it at all. While a large nuclear plant theoretically gets a vastly better value of $ per MW than any of the other alternative energies the need for a lot of capital at once and the need to sell the electricity in large volumes makes it unattractive to investors which is why so few have been built since the 1980s.
So while it would be nice to have a magic cheap little nuke we only get two out of the four since magic doesn't exist to give us the other three - cheap or little, where cheap is per MW and not for the enormous thing cheapskates do not want to pay for even if it's going to deliver a very good value of $/MW when it gets completed in a decade. More expensive per MW windmills are available far sooner and so much easier to pay for that popular short term voodoo economics judges them cheaper than something with a better return in the long run.
Fossils have a plethora of subsidies, some more obvious than others.
You don't need a big military presence in the middle east, or even the threat of one to keep the wind blowing. Oil does. We end up having to maintain alliances, troops, and share military firepower with awful countries like Saudia Arabia, Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, and many more. These relationships are deeply corrosive to the image we try to portray to ourselves as "freedom loving Americans". Double think becomes necessary at an early age. Good luck estimating a price tag for a corroded soul.
The hard evidence, the data is in the stocks of the big four (EnBW, E.ON, RWE, Vattenfall) being in free fall for years now, while them desperately searching buyers for their outdated, in deficit fossil plants. Recently they even tried moving them into bad-bank-style shell corps.
I'm not sure if wind power plants can be reduced to backyard size and still retain their efficiency, but I'm all in favor of decentralized power production even if it's naturally less efficient than centralized power systems. So long as the pollution or disposal costs aren't significantly greater, household or neighborhood power systems are preferable to single point of failures like nuclear or coal power plants or even hydroelectric power plants that require large dams to be built. I don't mind nuclear or fusion power if it can be safely built as part of a large apartment complex.
Property insurers are already factoring climate change into their actuary tables.
I do agree that if you're looking for assessments of risk and calculations of cost, actuaries are the guys you ask.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Hydro capacity is closed to maxed out - building new dams is controversial because the remaining potential locations are mostly ecologically sensitive. And you can't run hydro longer if you need more power. The amount of water behind the dam determines the sum total of power you can generate from it.
The big difference between the U.S. and Germany/UK with respect to this report is that average electricity prices in the U.S. is about $0.12/kWh. In the UK it's about $0.22/kWh. And Germany is about $0.32/kWh. The cost of wind in the U.S. (about $0.14-$0.19 / kWh last I checked) has been cheaper than the cost of typical electricity sources in the UK and Germany for many years now. The U.S. just uses more fossil fuels (and has lower electricity prices) because it has massive domestic coal and gas reserves, whereas the UK and Germany have to import most of their fossil fuels (or in the case of Germany, buy their electricity from neighboring countries).
Well, but then you have to add the cost of the gas power plant to the cost of the wind power plant in order to calculate the actual cost of wind power.
Yes, but you still need to add their cost to the cost of wind power plants as well.
Do you worry about the stagnating middle class incomes? Are you unwilling to take a 30% pay cut? If so, then you care.