Slashdot Mirror
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..
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 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.
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.
...a better reply to the 'blights on the landscape' would have been a few pictures of coal mines...
Most coal mines are not technically "a blight on the landscape", because being a blight on the landscape requires there to still be a landscape left to be a blight on.
I imagine the original pitch went like this: "People of Appalachia! Are you as sick as I am of these beautiful, majestic mountains everywhere? Well, what if there was a way to get rid of them?"
In Germany many of the on-shore mills are built nearby motorway crosses and similar wastelands. Those areas are totally spoiled already, therefore not much landscape lost. Actually the mills improve those areas. It's virtually impossible to built them within national parks and other landscapes considered to be nice. Direct result of public participation.
News flash from the present: The moon is slowing down the rotation of the earth through tides. We must carve giant channels through the continents to better allow the seas to get around the continents.
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.
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.
--
Mike
-- Mike Greaves
> 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.