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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.
No subsidies are needed when you internalize the costs of pollution associated with fossil fuel power plants.
So my electricity bill's going to go down now? No, I didn't think so either.
It's a pity wind and solar aren't reliable in the UK. Maybe we could install the turbines in parliament and make use of a ready supply of hot air. We could install solar panels too, the MPs all think the sun shines out of their arses.
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.
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?!?
The Fine Article also has an interesting graphic relating "Capacity Factor", which is "the percentage of a power plant's maximum potential that's actually achieved over time."
Notably, in the last 12 months, 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.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
This clearly shows why we so badly need Direct Action to subsidize the fossil fuel industry, and help it to become competitive again. If we don't act now, we may lose the fossil fuel industry forever. I don't know about you, but I find wind-mills to be a horrible blight on the landscape.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
I personally think the reason that solar and wind have gotten so cheap so fast is that they've found a way to manufacture small power plants than can be easily deployed. The more traditional forms of power generation such as nuclear, coal, gas, and hydro-electric seem to always focus on building huge generating stations, and building everything from the ground each time. With solar and wind power, the design problem is already solved, and you can (relatively) easily deploy a small power plant and build on as demand grows.
Nuclear power plants cost in the billions and take many years to get up and running. If they found a smaller, more standardized reactor that could be more easily deployed, it would be a lot cheaper to do, and they could build out capacity as they need it instead of having to plan 20 years in the future.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
As TFA points out, the reason it's the cheapest is because the renewable energy infrastructure is being installed so irresponsibly (possibly on purpose, as it benefits the renewables mfg's/installers) that it's sabotaging the efficiency of the fossil fuel and nuclear power plants.
Also, renewables there are only cheaper because electricity prices are so much higher in Europe than the U.S. (why? they have higher population density. Are there extra taxes on non-renewables or more stringent CO2 scrubbing requirements?).
The idea that this is a "virtuous cycle" is highly debatable. Price-wise, this is a vicious cycle.
If diverse forms of renewable energy were properly implemented in concert with existing power plants, the plants could be derated in such a fashion that decreased load factors would maintain or increase efficiency by allowing the plants to shrink the gap between their daytime and nighttime load factors. Future plants could have lower max outputs and higher load factors, lowering prices and spurring better and faster research to keep reducing the price of renewables.
Raising costs to make current renewables viable is a vicious cycle. A truly virtuous cycle would be one that doesn't hurt the consumers' pocketbooks and spurs innovation in renewables. The R&D dollars are already available for renewables because of global political pressure; we don't need to reduce the incentive for turning that money into technological progress by making fuel more expensive. Competition breeds innovation. Advantage breeds complacency. Rising energy prices will reduce the R&D incentive in both conventional and renewable energy sectors.
Wind power, including U.S. subsidies, became the cheapest electricity in the U.S. for the first time last year4, according to BNEF.
Why include subsidies? They don't lower the cost, they only chage who pays the bill.
However, in locations where wind is a good option the combination of wind, hydro, and natural gas makes a lot of sense. Especially if you have a few good nuclear plants to handle the load that wind and hydro can't supply at their peak.
Wind Turbines are slowing down the rotation of the earth. Days are becoming longer. Ice melting, due to extended daylight hours. We must switch to fossil fuels.
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.
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.
It's very easy to do that, because HFCS stores and transports so very well. All you need is a complete disregard for human health and the future of arable crop land in America.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes, but only to a point. There are inefficiencies in decreasing volume and of course, drawing down fossil fuel capacity will shut down productive refineries and cause job loss. Price of the fuel isn't simply a matter of how much inventory is available. If we increased production of oil, we'd probably be able to have even lower prices than we do now. It would run out sooner, but you'd have fully utilized refineries and the ability to get cheaper transport prices based on a higher guaranteed bulk to be transported over a set period of time.
Although I wouldn't suggest that you'd keep using a bad solution just to keep jobs, that doesn't prevent the issues with cutting back. Many of the jobs would not be easily retrained, which incurs a structural unemployment situation. You would also have under producing infrastructure that needs to be re-purposed or drawn down.
All of those costs of drawing down fossil fuel production would likely be borne by fossil fuel pricing, which would tend to make fossil fuels more expensive as it draws down. You might hit an equilibrium, but if it became a much less used commodity, there would still be a premium attached to it because of lower volume.
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.
Zing!
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.
Wind and solar have minuscule costs over the long term (just maintenance on the machines and lines).
Please then explain the massive fields of dead turbines in California and the southern tip of Hawaii.
Long term history teaches us that wind power plants shut down after just a decade or two. Why is that? If the long term cost is minuscule why would they have been decommissioned?
Of course there's tremendous cost to birds also but fuck wildlife, right?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Still stupid expensive. The average price of electricity in kW/h is 80% higher than in most places in the U.S.
All this study speaks to is the outrageous electricity cost in the U.K., not the cheap cost of wind.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
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.
--
Mike
-- Mike Greaves
infrastructure is being installed so irresponsibly
It doesn't say anything of the sort. If the generator is only running 70% of the time, then the capacity (not the efficiency) is 70%. What we are seeing is that renewables are displacing non-renewables. That's generally what we want if we hope for our kids to inherit the climate and fuel stocks that we've enjoyed. You have suggested some nefarious plot. That's crazy.
> Speaking of renewables in the U.S. why is hydro never mentioned when discussing renewables?!?
Two reasons. First, hydro at Niagra Falls and Lake Meade are great. Hydro is a good way to generate power in places where you have either huge waterfalls from a giant lake above a huge cliff or a giant canyon which can be dammed to make a lake that's 100 square miles. it's also a very good idea to make sure there aren't any cities downstream, so you don't kill 200,000 people (see Banqiao). There are a few such places in the US, so we built hydroelectric power stations at those locations. Built, as in past tense.
Computer models show that if we flooded the area from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians - most of the continental US - that would provide enough power to replace most of our fossil fuel use. (Morris 2013). So while hydroelectric is certainly nice to have, we already have about as much as we can have in the US, it can never replace fossil fuels in any significant way.
That still leaves a related question - why does US discussion of renewable energy focus on solar-electric 99% of the time, despite the fact that solar-electric is approximately the least efficient possible solution in most cases? Fifteen gallons of hot water is plenty enough for a shower. Black pipe outside that's 8 feet long and 6" ID will provide that, no problem (at least in the southern half of the country, and northern summers). That costs $20. So why are we promoting having an electric water heater plugged into an inverter, which is connected to a big bank of batteries full of hazardous chemicals, which are connected to a charge controller, which is in turn connected to a bunch of solar-electric panels? Seriously WTF? Because right now the politicians aren't trading billions of dollars of tax money for millions in campaign contributions with plumbing suppliers, the slush funds are titled "solar-electric". Obama says we should give a billion of your money and mine to the solar-electric guy, the solar electric guy gives Obama a million of it. It just so happens the politicians chose to call graft "solar electric" this time around, so we're spending billions on solar electric and therefore talking a lot about solar-electric. Reasonable, effective, efficient uses of solar, such as solar heating, don't get talked about because there's no billion-dollar grant program for that.
Nonsense, 90 percent of lung cancer deaths are of smokers.
No, a truly virtuous cycle would be one in which continuously polluting plants where eliminated in the process.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Were, sigh. Stupid voice input.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
A step in the right direction. The solution is always going to be a mix of technologies. One size does not fit all
A couple of weeks ago I flew over Altamont Pass just east of San Francisco and the wind farms weren't doing much...but it was sunny, so solar facilities would be cranking out the watts. As it should be. Earlier in the summer I was in northern Alberta (Edmonton -> Peace River -> High Level) and the perpetual wind had me watching for wind turbines. Saw a few.
Here in B.C. we have lots of hydroelectric capacity (and some fossil fuel generation, alas...) and are playing with wind and tidal power. Our climate isn't particularly sunny (except for the Okanagan), so solar is a non-starter.
...laura
By banning other, cheaper sources of energy they were able to make wind power the least-expensive of the most expensive ways of generating power.
Ken
You are mixing up the 'well known' prices for citizens/households with those for the industry.
Do you really believe a german steel mill pays 28cents per kWh? You cant be so dumb, can you?
I bet the prices for industrial consumers in the USA and Europe are more or less the same.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Oil comes from a process underground. It does not come from "fossils".
"A process"? So is this what the gnomes finally do with all the underpants?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Computer models show that if we flooded the area from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians - most of the continental US - that would provide enough power to replace most of our fossil fuel use.
A plan with no drawbacks!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Without the 95 percent of all tax subsidies and subsidized national and state land lease rates, this would be true in the US and Canada for both Wind and Solar.
Both would be cheaper than heavily subsidized fossil fuels, including coal.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
...to see how much progress the cost-effectiveness of alternate power can make when it is national policy to drive the costs of fossil fuel into the stratosphere with every anti-free-market, crony-capitalist-greasing trick in the political book.
Wind-power, a concept as old as ancient greece vs. ultra-volatile highly infrastructure dependant uranium powered nuclear fission that reqiures tons of stuff, material, equipment, regulation, controls and billionsof taxdollars just to get started. ... And thats not even counting the wasteproblem yet.
I'm a techno-romantic as much as the next guy here, but the simple truth is: nuclear fission is a techno-romantics pipe-dream from the 60ies that didn't pan out in just about every way imagined. It's to expensive, to complicated, runs into serious problems way more often before reaching breask-even and has a serious deal-breaking waste-problem that no sane responsible person can dismiss. We ought to keep one or two reactors running for science and r&d purposes and shut down all the rest.
Germany is doing the only right thing in this regard. Kudos to Merkel - and I'd never thought I'd say that. And no, I did not vote for her.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
That still leaves a related question - why does US discussion of renewable energy focus on solar-electric 99% of the time, despite the fact that solar-electric is approximately the least efficient possible solution in most cases?
Personally, I'd go with "freedom" and "individuality". Solar panels are the green energy solution that can realistically be installed by the most people.
Take the power source in the op article. Wind. Wind turbines scale up well, down not so much. In order to be economical, you want to install a HUGE one. For solar panels you can pretty much start with 1 panel if you wanted, and it wouldn't even be that much more expensive per watt than 10 with modern micro-inverters. With wind you're looking at the cheapest cost per watt being a huge turbine reaching up over 100 feet and producing enough power for a dozen homes.
Fifteen gallons of hot water is plenty enough for a shower. Black pipe outside that's 8 feet long and 6" ID will provide that, no problem (at least in the southern half of the country, and northern summers). That costs $20.
You haven't priced out pipe lately, have you? 10' of 6" PVC runs $50, getting black CPVC(good for hot potable water) will be more expensive.
8' isn't really a standard length.
So why are we promoting having an electric water heater plugged into an inverter, which is connected to a big bank of batteries full of hazardous chemicals, which are connected to a charge controller, which is in turn connected to a bunch of solar-electric panels? Seriously WTF?
We aren't, that's your thing. A more common setup will be solar panels running a heat pump to cool the home, complete with a desuperheater, such that rather than exhaust all the heat outside, some ends up in a hot water tank. After that, you also have the option of a 'heat pump' type water heater that can pull heat in from the house.
Another thing to realize is that substantial numbers of people are also hooked up into natural gas and propane systems - so their hot water/heat is via that, not electricity. Heck, the only electricity I need for heat is to run the controls - my heat is oil(because I live so far north that propane might liquify...).
Reasonable, effective, efficient uses of solar, such as solar heating, don't get talked about because there's no billion-dollar grant program for that.
You can get a tax credit for installing a solar heating system just as easily as a solar electric. It's just that everything about heating is cheaper than electricity.
I don't read AC A human right
The main point of the article is that the renewables are lowering the rentability of the baseload generator because they lower the marginal price to zero when the conditions are good.
This does not means that we don't need the gas/nuclear/coal ones at night when the wind does not blow.
Who will pay for them ?
Grandpa's off his meds again...
Hint: Next time provide sources, so readers can tell if you are a lunatic or not.
Were, sigh. Stupid voice input.
Which one are you using?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
People like to drink the cool-aid. Wind does have a part to play, just that its a pretty minor one. If they found some magic way to actually efficiently store the energy from Wind and Solar, then they would be in big business. Solar might play a larger role in a huge distributed network of residential generation and storage, however wind can't even do that. Bottom line is an electrified grid needs base power, the big 4 do not have a renewable replacement for that function.
That still leaves a related question - why does US discussion of renewable energy focus on solar-electric 99% of the time, despite the fact that solar-electric is approximately the least efficient possible solution in most cases? Fifteen gallons of hot water is plenty enough for a shower.
That's a good point. With an accumulation tank and a reasonably southern aspect you can get all your hot water needs covered by just a few square meters of solar collectors on your roof for six months of the year. In Sweden. So for those that need heating and hot water, solar collection and accumulation tanks makes a lot of sense.
Of course, cooling your house that way, which is the more pressing problem in many places in the US, is difficult with that setup. And if you need to run a heat pump for cooling, having the requisite accumulation capacity just for hot water, starts to make less sense. (Tanks aren't that cheap, and you need room for them). But it's definitely a technique you should keep in the back of your mind for when it makes sense. (My father in law runs such a setup, since he had the tanks already, as he heats his house with wood).
Stefan Axelsson
Plus this thread is about generating power in more than one place is it not?
I had taken the following bit from you as sarcasm - deliberately pretending to be an idiot but not actually being one:
Surely you are not so ignorant of the topic to be serious?