Renewable energy will be equal or cheaper than fossil fuels in 2020

The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) believes wind and solar will be equal or cheaper than fossil fuels by 2020.

Prices could be as low as three cents per kilowatt-hour for onshore wind and solar photovoltaic projects over the next two years. The average by 2020 is expected to be around five cents for onshore wind and six cents for solar photovoltaic auctions.

Hydropower was the cheapest at five cents per kilowatt-hour, onshore wind at six cents, and bioenergy and geothermal sources at seven cents. Solar projects are still high in comparison at 10 cents per kWh

145 thoughts on “Renewable energy will be equal or cheaper than fossil fuels in 2020”

  1. Nobody who know enough about power grids, like electric companies, plans on 100% solar and wind. To start with, we have 26% of US electricity supplied by hydroelectric and nuclear. Another 6% comes from biomass, which is both renewable and dispatchable. Hydroelectric *already is storage*, by virtue of the water behind the dam. So when you consider the whole grid, and not just single sources in isolation, the need for storage is greatly reduced. > to make a grid that’s five-nines reliable Hell, my electric power is fairly reliable, but nowhere near five-nines. In a good year it is 4 nines, and in a bad year 99.8%. Ask Puerto Rico what their grid reliability was in the past year, or south Florida from the hurricanes that hit.

  2. This is great, but it really doesn’t tell the whole story. If you want renewables to be used for any kind of dispatchable power, you have to factor in the cost of the storage required to make the primary capacity dispatchable. A quick-and-dirty way to compute this is to guess at how much of the energy from a renewable source has to go through a storage system in a grid dominated by renewables. The LCOE of renewables is $30/MWh, but the LCOE of stuff coming out of the storage systems (per fairly recent Lazard estimates for Li-ion battery farms) is about $270/MWh. If 30% has to come out of storage, then you get an average LCOE of $102/MWh. A better way to do this is to figure out the number of joules of storage you need per watt of generating capacity, then burden the capital cost of the renewables with the extra capital cost of the storage, and do your LCOE computation. That’s a bit beyond my competence, but maybe somebody else can take a crack at it? I’d estimate that, to make a grid that’s five-nines reliable out of mostly renewable sources, you’re going to need something like 6 joules of storage per watt of renewable capacity.

  3. Nobody who know enough about power grids like electric companies plans on 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} solar and wind. To start with we have 26{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of US electricity supplied by hydroelectric and nuclear. Another 6{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} comes from biomass which is both renewable and dispatchable. Hydroelectric *already is storage* by virtue of the water behind the dam.So when you consider the whole grid and not just single sources in isolation the need for storage is greatly reduced.> to make a grid that’s five-nines reliableHell my electric power is fairly reliable but nowhere near five-nines. In a good year it is 4 nines and in a bad year 99.8{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12}. Ask Puerto Rico what their grid reliability was in the past year or south Florida from the hurricanes that hit.

  4. This is great but it really doesn’t tell the whole story. If you want renewables to be used for any kind of dispatchable power you have to factor in the cost of the storage required to make the primary capacity dispatchable.A quick-and-dirty way to compute this is to guess at how much of the energy from a renewable source has to go through a storage system in a grid dominated by renewables. The LCOE of renewables is $30/MWh but the LCOE of stuff coming out of the storage systems (per fairly recent Lazard estimates for Li-ion battery farms) is about $270/MWh. If 30{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} has to come out of storage then you get an average LCOE of $102/MWh.A better way to do this is to figure out the number of joules of storage you need per watt of generating capacity then burden the capital cost of the renewables with the extra capital cost of the storage and do your LCOE computation. That’s a bit beyond my competence but maybe somebody else can take a crack at it? I’d estimate that to make a grid that’s five-nines reliable out of mostly renewable sources you’re going to need something like 6 joules of storage per watt of renewable capacity.

  5. This certainly will make a difference, but until the cost of large capacity power storage plus the cost of the renewable power is cheaper, it is not going to make a huge difference. By the way, the grid also needs improvement for renewable power to be used effectively.

  6. If this is true, the subsidies should be unnecessary. Rate payers using utilities that use more renewable power should see their rates go down. I see none these occuring to date. Something is wrong with this picture.

  7. This certainly will make a difference but until the cost of large capacity power storage plus the cost of the renewable power is cheaper it is not going to make a huge difference. By the way the grid also needs improvement for renewable power to be used effectively.

  8. If this is true the subsidies should be unnecessary. Rate payers using utilities that use more renewable power should see their rates go down. I see none these occuring to date. Something is wrong with this picture.

  9. If you have hydro or stored gas either LNG, caves or even the field if you can change output fast you don’t need much storage, just switch mode like on an plugin hybrid car. Now gas is an case in it self, in many cases its an by product of oil and dirt cheap as you have to use it or touch it. Other fields are primarily gas with some oil you collect in trucks.

  10. Except for those pesky issues of land use, non-reliability, positioning far away from areas of consumption, backup power requirements, seasonal decreases, lack of correspondence of power output vs power need. A 3 cent kilowatt-hour is meaningless if it’s not there when you need it. Backup fast response gas turbine power runs 3 cents per every kw-hr produced by wind or solar. Here in the mid Atlantic coal and nuclear power wholesale for around 3 cents.

  11. The nuke and hydro capacity obviously strongly affects that “how many joules per watt” figure of merit, but even with nuke and hydro available in some regions, that number isn’t going to drop below 3 or 4, and it’ll be higher in areas where the nukes and hydro aren’t available. The thing is that it’s pretty easy to let fossil sources backfill on the occasional calm and/or cloudy day when the renewables are 30% of capacity, but that’s gonna change in a steeply non-linear fashion as you get closer and closer to full decarbonization. If you can reduce the problem to that joules/watt kind of formulation, you can get a very precise handle on what your capital costs are going to be. And if you know the capex, you can compute a system-wide LCOE quite precisely. But waving $0.03/kWh around as if it means anything without burdening it with the stuff you need for grid reliability is pretty dishonest. On the number of nines: I’ll give you four nines, but anything lower than that starts to have a real economic impact. Availability is usually computed as: ((total customer minutes) – (total outage customer minutes)) / (total customer minutes). That means that point outages don’t change your reliability much, but systemic outages deeper in the network hurt a lot. A calm/cloudy day is by definition about as deep into the network as you can get.

  12. Not by much or rather pretty much by industry initiative standards. Lots of places give free land to put up industry for one as it give workplaces and tax income. On the other hand some renewable has so high subsidies they has been caught cheating running the backup diesel generator 24/7, yes the payout for the electricity was so high it paid of to go to the gas station by diesel and burn it in the not very efficient generator to produce power, that thing is probably less efficient than an modern car engine. It was discovered because solar plant produced power during night 🙂 On the gripping hand solar works well to counter air condition power spikes. its the case there use and power production match well. Last that has caused the price reduction? cheaper solar panels I get that, but wind, outside of large scale in production and installment I don’t see new tech who can reduce price.

  13. If you have hydro or stored gas either LNG caves or even the field if you can change output fast you don’t need much storage just switch mode like on an plugin hybrid car. Now gas is an case in it self in many cases its an by product of oil and dirt cheap as you have to use it or touch it. Other fields are primarily gas with some oil you collect in trucks.

  14. Except for those pesky issues of land use non-reliability positioning far away from areas of consumption backup power requirements seasonal decreases lack of correspondence of power output vs power need. A 3 cent kilowatt-hour is meaningless if it’s not there when you need it. Backup fast response gas turbine power runs 3 cents per every kw-hr produced by wind or solar. Here in the mid Atlantic coal and nuclear power wholesale for around 3 cents.

  15. The nuke and hydro capacity obviously strongly affects that how many joules per watt”” figure of merit”” but even with nuke and hydro available in some regions that number isn’t going to drop below 3 or 4 and it’ll be higher in areas where the nukes and hydro aren’t available.The thing is that it’s pretty easy to let fossil sources backfill on the occasional calm and/or cloudy day when the renewables are 30{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of capacity but that’s gonna change in a steeply non-linear fashion as you get closer and closer to full decarbonization.If you can reduce the problem to that joules/watt kind of formulation you can get a very precise handle on what your capital costs are going to be. And if you know the capex you can compute a system-wide LCOE quite precisely. But waving $0.03/kWh around as if it means anything without burdening it with the stuff you need for grid reliability is pretty dishonest.On the number of nines: I’ll give you four nines but anything lower than that starts to have a real economic impact. Availability is usually computed as: ((total customer minutes) – (total outage customer minutes)) / (total customer minutes). That means that point outages don’t change your reliability much”” but systemic outages deeper in the network hurt a lot. A calm/cloudy day is by definition about as deep into the network as you can get.”””

  16. Not by much or rather pretty much by industry initiative standards. Lots of places give free land to put up industry for one as it give workplaces and tax income. On the other hand some renewable has so high subsidies they has been caught cheating running the backup diesel generator 24/7 yes the payout for the electricity was so high it paid of to go to the gas station by diesel and burn it in the not very efficient generator to produce power that thing is probably less efficient than an modern car engine. It was discovered because solar plant produced power during night :)On the gripping hand solar works well to counter air condition power spikes.its the case there use and power production match well. Last that has caused the price reduction? cheaper solar panels I get that but wind outside of large scale in production and installment I don’t see new tech who can reduce price.

  17. One of the problems with wind power is that the global trend is lessening winds, perhaps caused by warming. CO2 caused warming is predicted to be greatest in the coldest regions of the planet, reducing the temperature differences between regions which cause winds.

  18. One of the problems with wind power is that the global trend is lessening winds perhaps caused by warming. CO2 caused warming is predicted to be greatest in the coldest regions of the planet reducing the temperature differences between regions which cause winds.

  19. It would be interesting to see an analysis of how much this projected lowering in cost of renewable energy will be subsidized by fossil fuel inputs… The transition away from fossil fuels is inevitable, but we need to be realistic about what it’s going to take to replace them.

  20. Pumped hydro is great if you have the right geography, but mostly you don’t. I’m not sure I’m understanding what you’re saying about “stored gas either LNG”. Compressed air storage is nowhere near economical unless you have exactly the right geology and, even then, you have to burn gas to get the turbine efficiency up during the expansion. If you’re simply saying that we can put a gas peaker behind the renewable capacity, that’s true, but it’s also really expensive. The capital costs are pretty high, and you’d be looking at capacity factors in the

  21. It would be interesting to see an analysis of how much this projected lowering in cost of renewable energy will be subsidized by fossil fuel inputs… The transition away from fossil fuels is inevitable but we need to be realistic about what it’s going to take to replace them.

  22. Pumped hydro is great if you have the right geography but mostly you don’t.I’m not sure I’m understanding what you’re saying about stored gas either LNG””. Compressed air storage is nowhere near economical unless you have exactly the right geology and”” even then you have to burn gas to get the turbine efficiency up during the expansion.If you’re simply saying that we can put a gas peaker behind the renewable capacity that’s true but it’s also really expensive. The capital costs are pretty high”” and you’d be looking at capacity factors in the “””

  23. Sulfur12 – you are obviously not including medical costs resulting from dirty fossil fuels as a subsidy. It is true that this subsidy is paid mostly by the poor who live closer to power plants. But the poor often do not have health insurance (although this is improving with Obamacare) and go to emergency rooms increasing health costs for all. Even when the people who go to hospitals because of asthma, bronchitis, cancer, and heart disease from power plant air pollution have insurance, it affects the cost of insurance. Doctors, pharmacies, lost work, and premature deaths from air pollution are paid by the electricity ratepayers and should be included as in the REAL cost of electricity. This IS a subsidy of fossil fuels. Why would anyone pay MORE to generate electricity that harms their children? Are they mercury-laced-coal lover Trump supporters? How much is the health cost subsidy to dirty fossil fuel electricity? According to the Cape Wind USACE report it came to 3.7 cents per KWh. This number only included easy to calculate health damage such as asthma admissions to hospitals that could be verified with precision. On an Ozone Alert day during the summer the morgue at any hospital in the severely polluted areas in the US like Connecticut statistically are more corpses from asthma deaths. Many people will rather pay more than see their loved ones die. Now clean renewable electricity costs LESS, not more and it also averts health damage to our children. Now this is a REAL good bargain.

  24. OK there are no Pesky issues only Pesky missinformers: 1) Land use: on Greek islands paid mercury-laced-coal lovers were causing furor with sheep herders that wind turbines will cause reduced fertility (no lie is tall enough for wind turbine paid haters). After installation sheep loved to rest in a line of the shadow of the wind turbines adding value to the treeless land beyond electricity. Not to mention tourists love to take photos in front of the wind turbines even ….marry. https://nawindpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/wind-4.jpg In a recent survey people complained that in the summer tree leaves block the beautiful view of wind turbines. 2) Non-reliability: wind turbines is by far the most reliable engineering marvel. Remote monitoring of iron particles in the oil triggers repairs before they break down. Coal, nuclear, fossil gas, and dirty oil have much more downtime for repairs. 3) Positioning far away from areas of consumption – at less 10 miles off the coast along the eastern seaboard there is more than enough wind for 100% of our electricity needs, transportation with electric cars, and heating and cooling. Coal power plants near cities are being closed because of disease causing and medical costs (Brayton Point in MA. Dirty or dangerous nuclear electricity increasingly is being removed from near dense populations. 4) Backup power requirements: increasingly the cost includes storage. A study showed that if we did not use existing hydro except on rare windless and simultaneously sunless times we could go 100% wind-solar-hydro, thank you very much. 5) Seasonal decreases: it is true there is more wind in the winter and more sun in the summer. Is that a problem? 6) Lack of correspondence of power output vs power need: You wish. In fact in many parts of the world wind power was adopted precisely to stop the brownouts and the blackouts. That is what happened on Greek Islands. 7) A 3 cent kilowatt-hour is meaningless: tell that to the ratepayers w

  25. Sulfur12 – you are obviously not including medical costs resulting from dirty fossil fuels as a subsidy. It is true that this subsidy is paid mostly by the poor who live closer to power plants. But the poor often do not have health insurance (although this is improving with Obamacare) and go to emergency rooms increasing health costs for all. Even when the people who go to hospitals because of asthma bronchitis cancer and heart disease from power plant air pollution have insurance it affects the cost of insurance. Doctors pharmacies lost work and premature deaths from air pollution are paid by the electricity ratepayers and should be included as in the REAL cost of electricity. This IS a subsidy of fossil fuels. Why would anyone pay MORE to generate electricity that harms their children? Are they mercury-laced-coal lover Trump supporters? How much is the health cost subsidy to dirty fossil fuel electricity? According to the Cape Wind USACE report it came to 3.7 cents per KWh. This number only included easy to calculate health damage such as asthma admissions to hospitals that could be verified with precision. On an Ozone Alert day during the summer the morgue at any hospital in the severely polluted areas in the US like Connecticut statistically are more corpses from asthma deaths. Many people will rather pay more than see their loved ones die. Now clean renewable electricity costs LESS not more and it also averts health damage to our children. Now this is a REAL good bargain.

  26. OK there are no Pesky issues only Pesky missinformers:1) Land use: on Greek islands paid mercury-laced-coal lovers were causing furor with sheep herders that wind turbines will cause reduced fertility (no lie is tall enough for wind turbine paid haters). After installation sheep loved to rest in a line of the shadow of the wind turbines adding value to the treeless land beyond electricity. Not to mention tourists love to take photos in front of the wind turbines even ….marry. https://nawindpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/wind-4.jpg In a recent survey people complained that in the summer tree leaves block the beautiful view of wind turbines. 2) Non-reliability: wind turbines is by far the most reliable engineering marvel. Remote monitoring of iron particles in the oil triggers repairs before they break down. Coal nuclear fossil gas and dirty oil have much more downtime for repairs. 3) Positioning far away from areas of consumption – at less 10 miles off the coast along the eastern seaboard there is more than enough wind for 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of our electricity needs transportation with electric cars and heating and cooling. Coal power plants near cities are being closed because of disease causing and medical costs (Brayton Point in MA. Dirty or dangerous nuclear electricity increasingly is being removed from near dense populations. 4) Backup power requirements: increasingly the cost includes storage. A study showed that if we did not use existing hydro except on rare windless and simultaneously sunless times we could go 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} wind-solar-hydro thank you very much. 5) Seasonal decreases: it is true there is more wind in the winter and more sun in the summer. Is that a problem? 6) Lack of correspondence of power output vs power need: You wish. In fact in many parts of the world wind power was adopted precisely to stop the brownouts

  27. And yes it does work, and yes it is poised to crack all of centralized power generation and yes the utilities are freaking out and are about to start screaming too big to fail.

  28. And yes it does work and yes it is poised to crack all of centralized power generation and yes the utilities are freaking out and are about to start screaming too big to fail.

  29. Converting a coal plant to gas would cost 0.4 cents per kilowatt-hour if run 90% capacity factor. 5% would be 7.2 cents. Realistically it would be more like 13% so 2.8 cents just to cover capital costs. All those fossil fuel plants are already built. So capital cost is already paid for.

  30. Isn’t is more like you just end up using like 10% of total energy generated as fossil fuels to back up your 60% solar and wind, 30% nuclear and hydro, and 10% biomass and geothermal. Those gas plants are already built, just repurpose. Non-dispatchibles are paired with demand response programs from a large EV fleet. This doesn’t even cover new already in trial technologies Allam cycle gas plants that can carbon capture for “free”.

  31. PJM Interconnection (which covers that area) has capacity auctions and they’re way less than that. The reality is there is massive extra fossil capacity on most grids already due to peaker plants for summer air conditioning demand spikes. So all you really have to pay for is maintenance and fuel say 13% of the year to back a renewables aggregate not also capital cost for new leakers.

  32. Converting a coal plant to gas would cost 0.4 cents per kilowatt-hour if run 90{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} capacity factor. 5{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} would be 7.2 cents. Realistically it would be more like 13{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} so 2.8 cents just to cover capital costs.All those fossil fuel plants are already built. So capital cost is already paid for.

  33. Isn’t is more like you just end up using like 10{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of total energy generated as fossil fuels to back up your 60{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} solar and wind 30{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} nuclear and hydro and 10{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} biomass and geothermal. Those gas plants are already built just repurpose. Non-dispatchibles are paired with demand response programs from a large EV fleet.This doesn’t even cover new already in trial technologies Allam cycle gas plants that can carbon capture for “free”.”

  34. PJM Interconnection (which covers that area) has capacity auctions and they’re way less than that.The reality is there is massive extra fossil capacity on most grids already due to peaker plants for summer air conditioning demand spikes. So all you really have to pay for is maintenance and fuel say 13{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of the year to back a renewables aggregate not also capital cost for new leakers.

  35. Why not? FUSION!

    If you read, reason and follow technical and scientific advances in the field you are sure to realize that we are within a very few years of commercially available clean, powerful, no waste, abundant power, fueled by Deuterium an isotope of hydrogen atoms which is plentifully and eternally available from sea water.

    So take your hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of expense and then consider its very brief and senseless life before proposing the horrid and very temporary “solution” of green energy to a problem (AGW) that likely does not exist to a degree worthy of being called a problem.

  36. Really, why do we need to reduce CO2 emissions. Cite a study that has been held to objective scrutiny and stood up to it. Just one will do. But be certain that the study has any predictive value since we could be embarking on a hundred trillion dollar venture if your suspicions are correct.

  37. If the greenies and warmists have their way, as they have had, the truth, if proving a loss, shall be deeply hidden, as is the true overall cost for “green” energy. Just watch your utility bills and compare them to older ones. Also, keep in mind that the governments at all levels are spending vast sums on energy that will forever be hidden from the equations. These monies are taken from your taxes and profligately spent by faceless bureaucrats, often benefiting friends and fellow conspirators.

  38. If that is so, and that is a big if, it will have been on the back of massive rebates, horrendously expensive government subsidies, loan guarantees, tax write-offs and the like. It will not be on pure accounting cost and profit accounting. Also, no provision in this scenario provide for the enormous, but hidden costs, such as parallel transmission lines, duplicate power generation plants, the actual rapidly escalating depreciation of plants now under-utilized but absolutely required due to the total unpredictability of power from “green” sources. These enormous costs are hidden or stepped around in the analysis, if one can call it that, of pending profitability.

    Gauge the truth of the claims of profitability on your utility bill. That will be close to factual revelation. If they are right, you should see a reduction. Are you expecting one?

    I call B.S.

  39. It is still 59% net for Allam cycle with capture on a LHV basis with that included. Paper is “Demonstration of the Allam Cycle: An update on the development status of a high efficiency supercritical carbon dioxide power process employing full carbon capture”. The Air Separation waste heat is looped into the power plant and re-used. That is 59% without a combined cycle – just the one. Quote from the paper “A portion of heat from a collocated ASU or other source of waste heat provides energy from J-I (to be addressed below) and then the hot exhaust provides recuperated energy in K-J to provide the total reheating energy of K-I”

    Enhanced oil recovery works great; do the math. The CO2 is separated from freed oil and recycled back in until it is “gone” at 0.250 tonnes per barrel of oil. Link “eor tons of co2 per ton of oil” There’s about 0.317 tonnes of CO2 per barrel of crude, so you reduced net carbon by 80%.

  40. Even in 2013 before cost overruns on Gen3 reactors it was $2150 per kilowatt in China estimated.

    https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2013/09/nuclear-reactor-costs-in-china.html

    And the Chinese don’t do full cost accounting including financing costs during build like the USA does. USA was at estimated $3500 overnight capital cost (vs $6000 full cost accounting) before the AP1000 builds started. So the Chinese were at more like $3500 per kilowatt full cost accounting in 2013.

    And they haven’t approved a new nuclear reactor since 2016 in China. Probably because they know building more Gen2 is a terrible idea safety-wise (enormous/impossible evacuation zones and building them upriver potentially contaminates a super important river basin) and Gen3 are just too expensive compared to wind and solar as those are set to beat all comers under just about every scenario starting in 2020 – and continue to get better, probably halving in price again by 2035 before leveling off.

  41. It doesn’t look like links are allowed so here’s the data based on search terms.

    IHS Markit has North American O&M market at 3-4 billion (so we’ll use 3.5 billion). “Aging US Wind Energy Fleet Driving Surge in Operating and Maintenance Spending, IHS Markit Says” article is from Nov 2017.

    USA rolling 12 month wind generation is 280TWh “eia Net Generation from Renewable Sources”. Like 6th link down. 2017 is 254TWh.

    Subtract out Canada’s 12,796 megawatts of wind times $45,000 per megawatt O&M average, it is $38,000 new – no linky here sorry running out of time. minus -576 million.

    So 2,924 million in the USA divided by 254TWh is 1.15 cents per kilowatt-hour. 2016 is 227TWh. Anyways, around 1.2 cents because Markit study probably used 2016 data.

    Oh yeah Mexico has 3,527MW. So likely even lower than that.

  42. Fossil Fuel Power plant do not have a single cost. There is at least one order of magnitude difference in cost from base load units to peakers to gas turbine peaking units. You ranks all of the units including contract purchases based on cost and MW and you dispatch off of this ranking. Solar power is available during the day which is normally a peak period and power is more expensive. Solar power is competing with Peaker Fossil Power which can be twice as expensive as base load power. And solar power can be built in small increments. You build a 600 MW power plant you have to retire 600 MW of generation more or less.

  43. Wish there was an edit; meant cc natgas at $614 per kilowatt but since we only need 1/2 to cover 1 of wind, $307 total per kilowatt of nameplate wind. And $125 per kilowatt of battery power ($250 per kWh energy) means we need 1/2 of that, so $62.50. kilowatt of nameplate onshore wind at $1625.

    P.S. Offshore wind will already be hitting 63% capacity factor in 2021 https://www.genewsroom.com/press-releases/ge-announces-haliade-x-worlds-most-powerful-offshore-wind-turbine-284260

  44. So why not burden it with the stuff that is needed?

    I did that and it didn’t

    Levelized cost (so without direct subsidy) of solar and wind is at 4.5 cents per kilowatt-hour

    https://www.lazard.com/media/450337/lazard-levelized-cost-of-energy-version-110.pdf

    Adding 0.5 watts of CC natgas at $307 per kilowatt and batteries to cover spoolup at $125 per kilowatt when the main capital cost is equivalent to about 3 cents per kilowatt hour for wind at $1625 per watt (the rest being O&M and other) means you’re adding perhaps 0.75 cents per kilowatt-hour to that 3 cents. Then add in the cost delta for fuel for running the natural gas plant at say 13% capacity factor at your chosen cost of carbon (about 1 cent per kilowatt-hour for natgas is added per $25 per tonne). There’s O&M also but it is quite low on gas plants.

    And finally the above is a bit of a worst case strawman scenario; it only applies to the last third or so of a 60% solar and wind scenario, and ignores continually dropping prices for solar and wind. Most dispatchable power plant decisions have to be made with a 30 year timeframe and done in big “chunks”. Solar and wind don’t so ride the cost curve reductions all the way down during that time frame. In addition onshore wind is expected to hit 60% capacity factors by about 2035 (probably sooner IMO).

  45. Current large scale storage projects are at $250/kWh when optimized for energy (Tesla in Australia), but those can still spike to 2C for minutes. So $250/kWh and $125 per kilowatt. Somewhat different costs if optimized for power over energy storage.

    So if you have a $614 per kilowatt cc plant for each 2 nameplate watts of say wind, and then add a kilowatt of battery power (minutes only at 2C normally 1C or less but that’s enough) at $125 per kilowatt….I don’t see how it breaks the economics when the wind turbine is $1625 per kilowatt? It is still the cheapest solution up to about a 50-60% of total electricity produced (depending on location of course), assuming you put say a $45 price on CO2 per tonne. You can do more than that 55%-ish if you have a large light vehicle EV fleet.

  46. I don’t think you can use CC; it won’t follow the load fast enough. When a cloud bank rolls in or the wind dies, you have only seconds to bring the backing capacity online and synchronize it. You can even that out a bit with some storage, but then you have to add its capital cost to the cost of the CC plant.

    And in all cases, you still have the coal plant retirement costs, which are non-trivial. Gotta love that fly ash!

  47. Sorry, its a ruse.

    We (wife and I) purchased a natural gas alternative sourcing 1 year contract that on paper was supposed to save us over 60% in our not-insubstantial natural gas fees. Sure enough, it increased them by over 40%.

    Why?

    Well, its all in the fine print of the contract.

    Basically alt-power producer-to-consumer relationships introduce a layer of billing that adds lines to primary energy cost that indeed seem to reduce the cost-per-therm or cost-per-kilowatt hour.

    But the utilities have gotten quite creative in unbundling the cost of distribution, the cost of metering, the cost of maintaining mains pipes, exploration costs, emergency preparedness costs, and incorporating all nature of interesting state-and-local taxes that in particular are NOT uniformly applied across all producers (or marketers).

    Our net bill — therm-for-therm — went up 40%. And the cost of getting out of the contract (again, squirreled away in the fine print) was so high that we decided to just keep doing it for the additional 5 months after we noticed the NET rate hike.

    Its a ruse.
    Entirely so.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  48. For a gas plant, capital cost is in $/MW, not $/MWh. For storage, it’s mostly (but not completely) $/MWh of storage.

    I had to beat my head against the Lazard numbers for a long time before I understood what they were. LCOS is, in fact, just like LCOE: It’s the cost of energy delivered, not the capital cost.

    If you’re going to backstop the renewables with gas, then you do the grid LCOE computation like this:

    1) Figure out how much nameplate gas capacity to you need to back some other amount of nameplate capacity. (Note that this is kinda like doing a capacity factor analysis, except with a probability distribution with very wide, very fat tails.)

    2) Add the specific capital cost ($/W) of the gas to the specific capital cost of the renewables.

    3) Compute your gas fuel costs based on the capacity factor.

    4) Do an LCOE calculation as normal.

    On the other hand, the grid LCOE computation for storage is a little bit different (and actually somewhat simpler):

    a) Figure out how many joules of storage per watt of renewable nameplate you need.

    b) Add the specific capital cost of the storage ($/J, not $/W as in the gas computation) to the specific capital cost of the renewables.

    c) Set capacity factor to 100%.

    d) Do the LCOE computation.

    There’s a slight wrinkle in doing the storage-based solution, in that you not only need to think about the energy stored by the system, but also the instantaneous power you need to deliver, but this is a second-order effect. The big-ticket item is the cost of the storage itself, not it’s hookup to the grid.

    Note that the Lazard LCOS numbers are **not** trying to do a grid LCOE; they’re simply estimating the LCOE for energy delivered from a plant that stores electricity and re-delivers it.

  49. Newton, Allam cycle power is oft-cited as being comparable to conventional combined cycle plant efficiency. Yet it has an energy-gotcha that is an Elephant in the Living Room.

    The thermodynamics of producing near-pure oxygen, 99+% pure, (any nitrogen left at the working temperatures of the Allam cycle will create a LOT of nitric oxides.) isn’t cheap.

    Producing oxygen is optimized when adiabatic compression and expansion can recover most of invested compressional energy. All the water-condensation, dust-filtration, CO₂ condensation, hydrocarbon vapor elimination just increase the energy-per-kilogram budget of producing near-pure oxygen. Parasitics.

    Because of the proprietary nature of oxygen/cryogenic gas enrichment, I am having difficulties finding hard numbers in terms of kilowatt-hours (or megajoules) per kilogram of purified oxygen produced. I’m under the impression it is expensive.

    Quoting from: https:\\www.degruyter.com\downloadpdf\j\aoter.2015.36.issue-1\aoter-2015-0011\aoter-2015-0011.pdf (repl \ with / to use) specifically …

    ⇒ “The main cost … refers to (the substantiL) energy consumed to separate oxygen from air (and with) modern cryogenic installations amounts to about 200 kWh/t of oxygen, exceeding thermodynamic minimum by about four times. Assuming that a … 500 MW plant requires 9000 t O₂ per day, necessary electrical-mechanical power to separate oxygen will be of about 75 MW continuously and (is 15% of) energy production.”

    That is significant (and quantitative).

    The authors helpfully keep the ‘cost’ to a power-production cost of oxygen extraction without adding in the TVoM¹ cost of the separation stack itself. Which is large, finicky, and fairly expensive in its own right.

    Clearly the money-dynamics of the oxy-combustion of fossil fuel depends on the polity of the government mandates to reduce CO₂ venting. From (the glib) Wikipedia article on Allam Cycle, the waste stream of compressed CO₂ needs disposal by some competent means that’ll sequester it for millennia, cheaply.

    Simply shipping it by pipe as a compressed solvent suitable for extracting hydrocarbons from thin or nearly depleted conventional crude oil fields, or as the “forcing gas” to extract methane from fractured shale deposits is fine, but … again little appreciated … is that the CO₂ ends up coming back out, and is usually quietly vented to the atmosphere.

    Not much sequestering, that.

    Equally — almost to the point of amusement — are glib proposals to make cements (for concrete) that absorb more CO₂ than their weight. Ultimately, these are all high-magnesium oxide limes; the limes in turn are kilned from high sulfate colomites, which in turn require prodigious amounts of input energy, which inevitably requires a LOT of fossil fuel burning. Oh, noes. Where does that CO₂ go? Ah… Um… Er…

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  50. PS: Y’all like Musk, don’t we?

    I do. His thinking epitomizes the get-go that makes him such a revered icon now. Always looking at the field of entrenched incumbents, and realizing “well, they’ve sure got profit margin built in. It clearly could be done both cheaper, better and more uniquely with out-of-the-box thinking”.

    Electric cars (not even a new idea), using big, flat, heavy-but-bomb-proof batteries (really unique idea) made out of tens of thousands of commodity-produced lithium cells, and wrapped in a sexy body with high performance synchronous high-RPM motors, to keep ’em compact and efficient.

    Seriously. That is 75% of the engineering-and-development business plan. Oh, passing safety regs, and getting industry certs, and doing endlessly edgy marketing, and so on… yah, that has to be included. But the fundies of tech? Not all that spectacular.

    Same for rocketry. On a NAPKIN, he realized that the entrenched incumbents were charging (ahem) astronomical prices for their medium-and-heavy lift rocket vehicles. And that the whole industry had become so ingrown that it took decades to roll out what only years-of-development-and-refining would nominally require.

    So… adding the totally appealing “recycle generation” idea of “soft-landing the rocket boosters for re-use and rapid-turnaround”, he had a business plan. And a quick evaluation showed that there were literally tens of thousands of competent electrical-engineering, mechanical-engineering and “rocket-engineering” talet out there. For hire. Ready to jump ship and jet to the stars with a New Company, with New Ideals and New Ideas.

    Again, it worked. As predicted on a NAPKIN.
    ________________________________________

    My point is this: the same “on a napkin” calculations can be done for nuclear. And given that nearly the totality of nuclear is a well-worked-out-and-totally-mature venture, it isn’t hard to show WHY the Chinese are able to craft competent, powerful, state-of-the-art nuclear power plants for less than $1,000 a kilowatt. BECAUSE… minus the industry entrenched incumbent kleptocracy, what’s left is pretty straight forward electro-mechanical engineering and materials science.

    It being a hot (oh, Lord) potato, politically… Musk isn’t inclined to reinvent the nuclear reactor. Oh, there are myriad calls for molten salt reactors, or thorium reactors, or pebble bed reactors, or you name it. But the bottom line is that NONE OF THE INNOVATIVE DESIGNS can do much (or any) better than current, mature, easy-to-duplicate plans for already certified, working, power producing, uranium designs. None of them.
    ________________________________________

    China eats our lunch because we accept the fatty kleptocracy.
    I don’t. Neither does Musk.
    Tho’ he HOPES to capitalize on it.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  51. As it has been said, “All markets will find a profitability to justify their multilayered kleptocracy to the fullest”, over time.

    For instance, in the mid 1970s, when the petroleum refiners who were selling their ‘waste’ propane for the equivalent of 25¢/gallon, and the 1973 Mideast Oil Crisis came down like a ton of bricks … with there being a huge uptick of people converting their cars and especially trucks to propane…

    The oil refiners quickly accommodated, and raised the price of propane to near-gasoline rates.

    Where it has remained ever since. Supply and demand? Nah… accounting and market-will-bear pricing.

    EXACTLY the same could be said about nuclear.

    Think about it: we have — today — hundreds of reactors built in the 1970s; they’re working; they’re producing gobs of power; except¹ for the utterly absurd levels of government-mandated industry regulation, they’re the cheapest (by far) method of producing electricity, anywhere. Nothing comes close to those 1970s power plants. Nothing.

    So.

    Mmmm… an old goat goes to think… and POOF! gets a light-bulb: I’m pretty sure the PLANS for those old 1970s power plants weren’t destroyed or lost (far be it, from their regulatory point of view). I’m also pretty sure that the manufacturing of all the ‘stuff’ that goes into one (of the hundreds) hasn’t gone fallow. I’m pretty certain that there are NOT substantial cost-savings-in-operating that newer plants have somehow conjured.

    Mmmm… so why not just duplicate the most cost effective nuclear power plants over, and over, and over again? EXACTLY the same, each time?

    The answer is … endless “improvement” justification afforded by capitalism.

    The advertising maxims, “New! Improved! Safer! Lower Cost! More output!” all sound good in a sales pitch, on the boardroom table, or wherever, but seriously… unless the price per kilowatt hour is reduced, none of that “new! better! more! faster!” is worth a pickle. Perhaps the “safer” could be worth something, but when one realizes that apart from some early nuke plant mechanical failures, after that the only failures of note were operator-error, well… it just doesn’t seem to me that yet-another-new-reactor-design is the answer to cheap power.

    But to show how the “will rise to justify the kleptocracy”, the Diablo Valley Nuclear Power Plant in California eventually spun out power at an investment cost of over $13,000,000,000 (2016 dollars), producing 8.3% of California’s power, and over 2,300 MW output. 24 hours a day. Unending.

    It did NOT need to cost thirteen GIGA bills.

    China — today, verily — is able to fabricate, install, and spin up similar plants for $1,000/kW or less. They are NOT very complicated plants in the end. Contrary to what is believed.

    China is able to do it.
    We used-to-could.

    Why not anymore?
    KLEPTOCRACY.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  52. Wow… 1.2¢/kWh? That’s really cheap. Yet, does it really foot? From what I’ve seen (as in observed-with-my-eyes), even in fairly optimal places (the Altamont Hills in the Bay Area), those big ol’ fans aren’t turning a whole lot of the time.

    576 megawatts plate-capacity installed.
    1.1 TWh/year output (Wikipedia).

    ⇒ 1.1 TWh × 1,000,000 MWh/TWh ÷ 576 MW plate
    → 1,909 MWh/MW and there being
    → 24 × 365 = 8760 hr/year
    → 1,909 ÷ 8760 = 21.8% duty factor.

    Given that — as far as I’ve been able to determine — that 1.5 to 4 MW wind turbines, INSTALLED cost is running between $1.5 million to $2.5 million per megawatt, ($1500 to $2500 per kilowatt), with the simple expedience of amortizing cost over time at 90% depreciation in 20 years (i.e. to “scrap” resale value), at 5% government paper BBB bond rates, these things are delivering power at 8.3¢/kWh assuming ZERO maintenance.

    Which of course is poppycock.

    Sure, there may be more wind-opportune locations than the 21.8% availability Altamont Pass, but I sure don’t know of many. And I’ve looked. Yes, I’m sure that if one were to somehow install the worlds largest turbines on Mt. Washington, or Rainier, or St. Helens, or across most of the peaks of the Cascade Range, sure… there is a lot more potential wind energy there then merely 21.8% of a 100% year’s potential.

    Again… I question those EIA numbers. Could you provide a linky, please?

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  53. Lazard’s numbers don’t really apply regardless. If you back 1 kilowatt nameplate renewable with 0.5 kilowatts of combined cycle natural gas at $0.61 per watt capital cost it isn’t going to break the economics.

  54. You seem to be confusing MWh costed for energy delivered and MWh total capital cost for storage which is VERY different. You can cycle a battery farm a thousand times a year. Thats why Lazard was careful to call one LCOE and the other LCOS.

  55. Massively propped up by not paying for externalities. If you think carbon dioxide should be taxed at $44 per tonne, then US coal plants being able to buy NOx emission certificates at $770 per tonne (300x warming potential of CO2) is a huge price support. It should be $13200 (300×44). Then air quality pollution in heavily populated areas at vastly cheaper price spent to remediate than motor vehicles implied rates by look at NOx rates and cost of that compliance.

  56. It REALLY would be nice for people writing these articles to do a bit of math. Seriously.

    Just use Excel.

    ⇒ -pmt( rate, periods, principal ), where (for evaluating PV power):

    … years = 20 (not periods directly)
    … rate = 5% / kWh per year
    … periods = years • KWh per year
    … principal = total bare-earth to operating power system cost

    That’s the one: it shows time value of money. As a proxy for more complicated TVoM Harvard Business School math. With this, one can also work “backwards”, meaning … make a guess, then refine it by how far you’re off.

    For instance, I guessed:

    ⇒ years = 20 (seems like a reasonable long term proposition);
    ⇒ kWh/y = 2,084 (85% (weather) of 28% (diurnal) of 8760 hr/year)
    ⇒ rate = 5% ÷ 2,084
    ⇒ periods = 20 × 2,084
    ⇒ principal = $1,000 per kilowatt “peak plate”.

    What was the result?

    ⇒ $0.0378 = -pmt( 0.00002398, 41,697, 1000 );

    Showing that even $1,000 per kilowatt of installed solar is too high to deliver 3.0¢/kWh energy. Easily too much. Just from proportions:

    ⇒ $791 = $1,000 × ($0.030 / $0.0378)

    So this means that INSTALLED, all in, the cost of solar would have to drop substantially below $791 per kilowatt peak in order to satsify the 3¢/kWh quote. It would need to be less than $791 because of course there is operational overhead.

    • Administration
    • Land Cost
    • Maintenance
    • Periodic certification
    • Insurance
    • Groundskeeping

    Anyway, I’m sure everyone already was aware of this. I just don’t think that 3¢/kWh in the upcoming years is going to be realistically deliverable by PV.
    ________________________________________

    Now, how about WIND? From the WIND INDUSTRY mag, I quote: “The costs for a utility scale wind turbine range from about $1.3 million to $2.2 million per MW of nameplate capacity installed. Most of the commercial-scale turbines installed today are 2 MW in size and cost roughly $3-$4 million installed.”

    Well there you are. $3 to $4 million installed for 2 megawatt systems is $1,500 to $2,000 per kilowatt of peak plate power. Most wind locations are NOT very even in generating power. Somewhat better than Solar mostly, but not wildly so except for the most unique locations.

    Again, our -pmt() formula works well:

    ⇒ years = 20 (same)
    ⇒ kWh/y = 3,000 (from google)
    ⇒ rate = 5% ÷ 3,000
    ⇒ periods = 20 × 3,000
    ⇒ principal = $1,138 per kilowatt “peak plate”.

    What was the result?

    ⇒ $0.0300 = -pmt( 0.00001667, 60,000, 1138 );

    (I incorporated the ‘fudge factor’ in the principal.)

    Question is, will the mega-scale wind turbine makers be able to beat $1,138 per kilowatt? I’m betting they can, eventually. Chinese will be happy to make the expensive parts cheap… motors, blades, all that. Getting it all to fit in standard shipping containers is the key.

    Just saying,
    GoatGuy

  57. Solar polar is next to useless at our latitudes from the point of view of powering an economy. If nuclear fusion becomes a reality then nearly all other forms of generation become obsolete. It’s a big if I admit, however history suggests that technical problems will always be overcome. Here’s hoping!

  58. Of course Im not including that, just like nobody in favor of wind/solar does not include enviromental damage and its costs for human life; or how much pollution is created to make turbines and solar panels and how it impacts everything else. My question is plain and simple: what kind of subsidies, not externalities-thats what you are refering to-are included in this profitability calculation. Do not muddy the water with sophistry. Its not like what you are saying aint true; but I wasnt asking about that and thats not answer to my concerns.

  59. Solar power competes with Peakers fossil power plant which can be twice as expensive as baseload fossil power plant. Solar power can be incrementally built while a fossil fuel power plant in a monolith and when it goes online some other power plant has to go offline. A solar power plant can be built in a short time and goes into production in a short time and in a short time starts paying off its debt. Not the same with a fossil power plant. The power for a solar power plant can be sold for nothing within costing money so it is always dispatchable. The power from a fossil fuel power plant always cost money so it isn’t always dispatchable. A fossil fuel power plant can sell its full capacity at a higher charge than a solar power plant, so it has that going for it.

  60. Converting a coal plant to gas would cost 0.4 cents per kilowatt-hour if run 90% capacity factor. 5% would be 7.2 cents. Realistically it would be more like 13% so 2.8 cents just to cover capital costs. All those fossil fuel plants are already built. So capital cost is already paid for.

  61. Converting a coal plant to gas would cost 0.4 cents per kilowatt-hour if run 90{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} capacity factor. 5{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} would be 7.2 cents. Realistically it would be more like 13{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} so 2.8 cents just to cover capital costs.All those fossil fuel plants are already built. So capital cost is already paid for.

  62. Isn’t is more like you just end up using like 10% of total energy generated as fossil fuels to back up your 60% solar and wind, 30% nuclear and hydro, and 10% biomass and geothermal. Those gas plants are already built, just repurpose. Non-dispatchibles are paired with demand response programs from a large EV fleet. This doesn’t even cover new already in trial technologies Allam cycle gas plants that can carbon capture for “free”.

  63. Isn’t is more like you just end up using like 10{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of total energy generated as fossil fuels to back up your 60{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} solar and wind 30{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} nuclear and hydro and 10{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} biomass and geothermal. Those gas plants are already built just repurpose. Non-dispatchibles are paired with demand response programs from a large EV fleet.This doesn’t even cover new already in trial technologies Allam cycle gas plants that can carbon capture for “free”.”

  64. PJM Interconnection (which covers that area) has capacity auctions and they’re way less than that. The reality is there is massive extra fossil capacity on most grids already due to peaker plants for summer air conditioning demand spikes. So all you really have to pay for is maintenance and fuel say 13% of the year to back a renewables aggregate not also capital cost for new leakers.

  65. PJM Interconnection (which covers that area) has capacity auctions and they’re way less than that.The reality is there is massive extra fossil capacity on most grids already due to peaker plants for summer air conditioning demand spikes. So all you really have to pay for is maintenance and fuel say 13{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of the year to back a renewables aggregate not also capital cost for new leakers.

  66. And yes it does work, and yes it is poised to crack all of centralized power generation and yes the utilities are freaking out and are about to start screaming too big to fail.

  67. And yes it does work and yes it is poised to crack all of centralized power generation and yes the utilities are freaking out and are about to start screaming too big to fail.

  68. ‘A study showed that if we did not use existing hydro except on rare windless and simultaneously sunless times we could go 100% wind-solar-hydro’
    Several studies, actually. Which have been widely ridiculed.For example, on Mark Jacobson et al’s latest paper -‘The article, authored by 21 leading energy researchers from institutions including U.C. Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Jacobson’s own Stanford University, found that Jacobson’s analysis “used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.” Thus, they conclude, Jacobson’s findings on the cost-effectiveness and feasibility of a full transition to wind, water, and solar “are not supported by adequate and realistic analysis and do not provide a reliable guide to whether and at what cost such a transition might be achieved. In contrast, the weight of the evidence suggests that a broad portfolio of energy options will help facilitate an affordable transition to a near-zero emission energy system.”( from Scientific American )
    ‘Iowa has the highest electricity % and is among the least expensive areas for electricity in the US.’ I don’t think Iowa’s power prices have fallen because of wind power. The percentage of power produced in the state from wind went from 7.7% in 2008 to 15.4% in 2010. Average household prices went from 8.26c/kwh in 2007 to 10.06c in 2011, and are now at 12.05 c.

  69. Turning a baseload Rankine plant into a gas peaker–or even a gas combined cycle plant–is the kind of refit you do by tearing the old plant down and building a new one on the same site.

    I guess you’d save the real estate and acquisition costs. But you’d have to do the cleanup of the old plant, which would be a non-trivial capital cost.

  70. Land area… solar, where here in the east, Dominion is buying farmland and building solar farms to supply the oh-so-green Google, Apple, Facebook, and other progressive users escaping the power nightmare of the west (that their policies created!). Non-reliability… you do agree that on a cold or hot night solar goes to zero, right? And for wind reliability, you might want to check the UK electricity records where there are periods of many days where wind goes below 1% capacity and fields filled with dirty and expensive diesels keep the lights on. Positioning… off shore wind is beloved by by everyone. Witness the embrace of turbines by the progressive elite of Nantucket. And off-shore wind is the most expensive form of wind, where maintenance alone runs more than coal or nuclear. Storage… please post the costs of storage in the gigawatt hour range. And remember, you don’t always have mountains for inefficient pumped storage. Seasonal decreases: you might want to consider that peak power in the northern US is during the long dark and cold winters, where solar gets up late and goes to sleep early. Lack of power when you need it: you realize that Germany is paying people to take power when it is not required to keep their grid stable, California’s duck curve is getting to the point where instability is an issue. 3 cent kw-hrs are meaningless: Cape Wind is dead. Vineyard wind will wholesale power for 8 cents / kw-hr, when they have it to sell. And that’s after the federal tax credits transferring much of the cost to the taxpayers. And without the cost of backup. That’s over three times the peak power cost in the mid-Atlantic, where coal drops below 3 cents. Our current retail price for electricity is a flat 10.8 cents. Nuclear: Most of my power comes from nuclear plants and I pay 10.8 cents.

  71. Sulfur12 – you are obviously not including medical costs resulting from dirty fossil fuels as a subsidy. It is true that this subsidy is paid mostly by the poor who live closer to power plants. But the poor often do not have health insurance (although this is improving with Obamacare) and go to emergency rooms increasing health costs for all. Even when the people who go to hospitals because of asthma, bronchitis, cancer, and heart disease from power plant air pollution have insurance, it affects the cost of insurance. Doctors, pharmacies, lost work, and premature deaths from air pollution are paid by the electricity ratepayers and should be included as in the REAL cost of electricity. This IS a subsidy of fossil fuels. Why would anyone pay MORE to generate electricity that harms their children? Are they mercury-laced-coal lover Trump supporters? How much is the health cost subsidy to dirty fossil fuel electricity? According to the Cape Wind USACE report it came to 3.7 cents per KWh. This number only included easy to calculate health damage such as asthma admissions to hospitals that could be verified with precision. On an Ozone Alert day during the summer the morgue at any hospital in the severely polluted areas in the US like Connecticut statistically are more corpses from asthma deaths. Many people will rather pay more than see their loved ones die. Now clean renewable electricity costs LESS, not more and it also averts health damage to our children. Now this is a REAL good bargain.

  72. Sulfur12 – you are obviously not including medical costs resulting from dirty fossil fuels as a subsidy. It is true that this subsidy is paid mostly by the poor who live closer to power plants. But the poor often do not have health insurance (although this is improving with Obamacare) and go to emergency rooms increasing health costs for all. Even when the people who go to hospitals because of asthma bronchitis cancer and heart disease from power plant air pollution have insurance it affects the cost of insurance. Doctors pharmacies lost work and premature deaths from air pollution are paid by the electricity ratepayers and should be included as in the REAL cost of electricity. This IS a subsidy of fossil fuels. Why would anyone pay MORE to generate electricity that harms their children? Are they mercury-laced-coal lover Trump supporters? How much is the health cost subsidy to dirty fossil fuel electricity? According to the Cape Wind USACE report it came to 3.7 cents per KWh. This number only included easy to calculate health damage such as asthma admissions to hospitals that could be verified with precision. On an Ozone Alert day during the summer the morgue at any hospital in the severely polluted areas in the US like Connecticut statistically are more corpses from asthma deaths. Many people will rather pay more than see their loved ones die. Now clean renewable electricity costs LESS not more and it also averts health damage to our children. Now this is a REAL good bargain.

  73. OK there are no Pesky issues only Pesky missinformers: 1) Land use: on Greek islands paid mercury-laced-coal lovers were causing furor with sheep herders that wind turbines will cause reduced fertility (no lie is tall enough for wind turbine paid haters). After installation sheep loved to rest in a line of the shadow of the wind turbines adding value to the treeless land beyond electricity. Not to mention tourists love to take photos in front of the wind turbines even ….marry. https://nawindpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/wind-4.jpg In a recent survey people complained that in the summer tree leaves block the beautiful view of wind turbines. 2) Non-reliability: wind turbines is by far the most reliable engineering marvel. Remote monitoring of iron particles in the oil triggers repairs before they break down. Coal, nuclear, fossil gas, and dirty oil have much more downtime for repairs. 3) Positioning far away from areas of consumption – at less 10 miles off the coast along the eastern seaboard there is more than enough wind for 100% of our electricity needs, transportation with electric cars, and heating and cooling. Coal power plants near cities are being closed because of disease causing and medical costs (Brayton Point in MA. Dirty or dangerous nuclear electricity increasingly is being removed from near dense populations. 4) Backup power requirements: increasingly the cost includes storage. A study showed that if we did not use existing hydro except on rare windless and simultaneously sunless times we could go 100% wind-solar-hydro, thank you very much. 5) Seasonal decreases: it is true there is more wind in the winter and more sun in the summer. Is that a problem? 6) Lack of correspondence of power output vs power need: You wish. In fact in many parts of the world wind power was adopted precisely to stop the brownouts and the blackouts. That is what happened on Greek Islands. 7) A 3 cent kilowatt-hour is meaningless: tell that to the ratepayers w

  74. OK there are no Pesky issues only Pesky missinformers:1) Land use: on Greek islands paid mercury-laced-coal lovers were causing furor with sheep herders that wind turbines will cause reduced fertility (no lie is tall enough for wind turbine paid haters). After installation sheep loved to rest in a line of the shadow of the wind turbines adding value to the treeless land beyond electricity. Not to mention tourists love to take photos in front of the wind turbines even ….marry. https://nawindpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/wind-4.jpg In a recent survey people complained that in the summer tree leaves block the beautiful view of wind turbines. 2) Non-reliability: wind turbines is by far the most reliable engineering marvel. Remote monitoring of iron particles in the oil triggers repairs before they break down. Coal nuclear fossil gas and dirty oil have much more downtime for repairs. 3) Positioning far away from areas of consumption – at less 10 miles off the coast along the eastern seaboard there is more than enough wind for 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of our electricity needs transportation with electric cars and heating and cooling. Coal power plants near cities are being closed because of disease causing and medical costs (Brayton Point in MA. Dirty or dangerous nuclear electricity increasingly is being removed from near dense populations. 4) Backup power requirements: increasingly the cost includes storage. A study showed that if we did not use existing hydro except on rare windless and simultaneously sunless times we could go 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} wind-solar-hydro thank you very much. 5) Seasonal decreases: it is true there is more wind in the winter and more sun in the summer. Is that a problem? 6) Lack of correspondence of power output vs power need: You wish. In fact in many parts of the world wind power was adopted precisely to stop the brownouts

  75. I was speaking of summer and winter peak loads, where prices to hit 3-4 cents. On a regular day, coal power is going for 1.6 cents. Less than it costs to maintain a wind turbine.

  76. Converting a coal plant to gas would cost 0.4 cents per kilowatt-hour if run 90% capacity factor. 5% would be 7.2 cents. Realistically it would be more like 13% so 2.8 cents just to cover capital costs.

    All those fossil fuel plants are already built. So capital cost is already paid for.

  77. Isn’t is more like you just end up using like 10% of total energy generated as fossil fuels to back up your 60% solar and wind, 30% nuclear and hydro, and 10% biomass and geothermal. Those gas plants are already built, just repurpose. Non-dispatchibles are paired with demand response programs from a large EV fleet.

    This doesn’t even cover new already in trial technologies Allam cycle gas plants that can carbon capture for “free”.

  78. PJM Interconnection (which covers that area) has capacity auctions and they’re way less than that.

    The reality is there is massive extra fossil capacity on most grids already due to peaker plants for summer air conditioning demand spikes. So all you really have to pay for is maintenance and fuel say 13% of the year to back a renewables aggregate not also capital cost for new leakers.

  79. And yes it does work, and yes it is poised to crack all of centralized power generation and yes the utilities are freaking out and are about to start screaming too big to fail.

  80. It would be interesting to see an analysis of how much this projected lowering in cost of renewable energy will be subsidized by fossil fuel inputs… The transition away from fossil fuels is inevitable, but we need to be realistic about what it’s going to take to replace them.

  81. It would be interesting to see an analysis of how much this projected lowering in cost of renewable energy will be subsidized by fossil fuel inputs… The transition away from fossil fuels is inevitable but we need to be realistic about what it’s going to take to replace them.

  82. Pumped hydro is great if you have the right geography, but mostly you don’t. I’m not sure I’m understanding what you’re saying about “stored gas either LNG”. Compressed air storage is nowhere near economical unless you have exactly the right geology and, even then, you have to burn gas to get the turbine efficiency up during the expansion. If you’re simply saying that we can put a gas peaker behind the renewable capacity, that’s true, but it’s also really expensive. The capital costs are pretty high, and you’d be looking at capacity factors in the

  83. Pumped hydro is great if you have the right geography but mostly you don’t.I’m not sure I’m understanding what you’re saying about stored gas either LNG””. Compressed air storage is nowhere near economical unless you have exactly the right geology and”” even then you have to burn gas to get the turbine efficiency up during the expansion.If you’re simply saying that we can put a gas peaker behind the renewable capacity that’s true but it’s also really expensive. The capital costs are pretty high”” and you’d be looking at capacity factors in the “””

  84. One of the problems with wind power is that the global trend is lessening winds, perhaps caused by warming. CO2 caused warming is predicted to be greatest in the coldest regions of the planet, reducing the temperature differences between regions which cause winds.

  85. One of the problems with wind power is that the global trend is lessening winds perhaps caused by warming. CO2 caused warming is predicted to be greatest in the coldest regions of the planet reducing the temperature differences between regions which cause winds.

  86. Sulfur12 – you are obviously not including medical costs resulting from dirty fossil fuels as a subsidy.

    It is true that this subsidy is paid mostly by the poor who live closer to power plants. But the poor often do not have health insurance (although this is improving with Obamacare) and go to emergency rooms increasing health costs for all. Even when the people who go to hospitals because of asthma, bronchitis, cancer, and heart disease from power plant air pollution have insurance, it affects the cost of insurance. Doctors, pharmacies, lost work, and premature deaths from air pollution are paid by the electricity ratepayers and should be included as in the REAL cost of electricity. This IS a subsidy of fossil fuels. Why would anyone pay MORE to generate electricity that harms their children? Are they mercury-laced-coal lover Trump supporters?

    How much is the health cost subsidy to dirty fossil fuel electricity?

    According to the Cape Wind USACE report it came to 3.7 cents per KWh. This number only included easy to calculate health damage such as asthma admissions to hospitals that could be verified with precision. On an Ozone Alert day during the summer the morgue at any hospital in the severely polluted areas in the US like Connecticut statistically are more corpses from asthma deaths. Many people will rather pay more than see their loved ones die. Now clean renewable electricity costs LESS, not more and it also averts health damage to our children. Now this is a REAL good bargain.

  87. OK there are no Pesky issues only Pesky missinformers:
    1) Land use: on Greek islands paid mercury-laced-coal lovers were causing furor with sheep herders that wind turbines will cause reduced fertility (no lie is tall enough for wind turbine paid haters).
    After installation sheep loved to rest in a line of the shadow of the wind turbines adding value to the treeless land beyond electricity. Not to mention tourists love to take photos in front of the wind turbines even ….marry. https://nawindpower.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/wind-4.jpg In a recent survey people complained that in the summer tree leaves block the beautiful view of wind turbines.
    2) Non-reliability: wind turbines is by far the most reliable engineering marvel. Remote monitoring of iron particles in the oil triggers repairs before they break down. Coal, nuclear, fossil gas, and dirty oil have much more downtime for repairs.
    3) Positioning far away from areas of consumption – at less 10 miles off the coast along the eastern seaboard there is more than enough wind for 100% of our electricity needs, transportation with electric cars, and heating and cooling. Coal power plants near cities are being closed because of disease causing and medical costs (Brayton Point in MA. Dirty or dangerous nuclear electricity increasingly is being removed from near dense populations.
    4) Backup power requirements: increasingly the cost includes storage. A study showed that if we did not use existing hydro except on rare windless and simultaneously sunless times we could go 100% wind-solar-hydro, thank you very much.
    5) Seasonal decreases: it is true there is more wind in the winter and more sun in the summer. Is that a problem?
    6) Lack of correspondence of power output vs power need: You wish. In fact in many parts of the world wind power was adopted precisely to stop the brownouts and the blackouts. That is what happened on Greek Islands.
    7) A 3 cent kilowatt-hour is meaningless: tell that to the ratepayers whose electricity bills went down AFTER installation of wind power. Iowa has the highest electricity % and is among the least expensive areas for electricity in the US. Also medical costs are meaningful. The US Army Corps of Engineers for the Cape Wind project showed that the 120 or so turbines would have generated 1,500,000 MWh a year that CONSERVATIVELY would have saved $53,000,000 medical costs from averted air pollution or 3.7cents/KWh. No mention of hard to calculate damage like mercury damage to fetuses and autism. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080424120953.htm
    8) Backup from disease causing petrogas came more expensive than backup batteries in Southern California when they went to bids to provide for peak demand. Nuclear LOL is the most expensive of all (though not as dangerous as coal) because nuclear cannot afford to pay insurance in private markets. Two acts of congress define Federal, state, and local government as the insurer of last resort. Why? FUKUSHIMA!

  88. Except for those pesky issues of land use, non-reliability, positioning far away from areas of consumption, backup power requirements, seasonal decreases, lack of correspondence of power output vs power need. A 3 cent kilowatt-hour is meaningless if it’s not there when you need it. Backup fast response gas turbine power runs 3 cents per every kw-hr produced by wind or solar. Here in the mid Atlantic coal and nuclear power wholesale for around 3 cents.

  89. Except for those pesky issues of land use non-reliability positioning far away from areas of consumption backup power requirements seasonal decreases lack of correspondence of power output vs power need. A 3 cent kilowatt-hour is meaningless if it’s not there when you need it. Backup fast response gas turbine power runs 3 cents per every kw-hr produced by wind or solar. Here in the mid Atlantic coal and nuclear power wholesale for around 3 cents.

  90. If you have hydro or stored gas either LNG, caves or even the field if you can change output fast you don’t need much storage, just switch mode like on an plugin hybrid car. Now gas is an case in it self, in many cases its an by product of oil and dirt cheap as you have to use it or touch it. Other fields are primarily gas with some oil you collect in trucks.

  91. If you have hydro or stored gas either LNG caves or even the field if you can change output fast you don’t need much storage just switch mode like on an plugin hybrid car. Now gas is an case in it self in many cases its an by product of oil and dirt cheap as you have to use it or touch it. Other fields are primarily gas with some oil you collect in trucks.

  92. The nuke and hydro capacity obviously strongly affects that “how many joules per watt” figure of merit, but even with nuke and hydro available in some regions, that number isn’t going to drop below 3 or 4, and it’ll be higher in areas where the nukes and hydro aren’t available. The thing is that it’s pretty easy to let fossil sources backfill on the occasional calm and/or cloudy day when the renewables are 30% of capacity, but that’s gonna change in a steeply non-linear fashion as you get closer and closer to full decarbonization. If you can reduce the problem to that joules/watt kind of formulation, you can get a very precise handle on what your capital costs are going to be. And if you know the capex, you can compute a system-wide LCOE quite precisely. But waving $0.03/kWh around as if it means anything without burdening it with the stuff you need for grid reliability is pretty dishonest. On the number of nines: I’ll give you four nines, but anything lower than that starts to have a real economic impact. Availability is usually computed as: ((total customer minutes) – (total outage customer minutes)) / (total customer minutes). That means that point outages don’t change your reliability much, but systemic outages deeper in the network hurt a lot. A calm/cloudy day is by definition about as deep into the network as you can get.

  93. The nuke and hydro capacity obviously strongly affects that how many joules per watt”” figure of merit”” but even with nuke and hydro available in some regions that number isn’t going to drop below 3 or 4 and it’ll be higher in areas where the nukes and hydro aren’t available.The thing is that it’s pretty easy to let fossil sources backfill on the occasional calm and/or cloudy day when the renewables are 30{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of capacity but that’s gonna change in a steeply non-linear fashion as you get closer and closer to full decarbonization.If you can reduce the problem to that joules/watt kind of formulation you can get a very precise handle on what your capital costs are going to be. And if you know the capex you can compute a system-wide LCOE quite precisely. But waving $0.03/kWh around as if it means anything without burdening it with the stuff you need for grid reliability is pretty dishonest.On the number of nines: I’ll give you four nines but anything lower than that starts to have a real economic impact. Availability is usually computed as: ((total customer minutes) – (total outage customer minutes)) / (total customer minutes). That means that point outages don’t change your reliability much”” but systemic outages deeper in the network hurt a lot. A calm/cloudy day is by definition about as deep into the network as you can get.”””

  94. Not by much or rather pretty much by industry initiative standards. Lots of places give free land to put up industry for one as it give workplaces and tax income. On the other hand some renewable has so high subsidies they has been caught cheating running the backup diesel generator 24/7, yes the payout for the electricity was so high it paid of to go to the gas station by diesel and burn it in the not very efficient generator to produce power, that thing is probably less efficient than an modern car engine. It was discovered because solar plant produced power during night 🙂 On the gripping hand solar works well to counter air condition power spikes. its the case there use and power production match well. Last that has caused the price reduction? cheaper solar panels I get that, but wind, outside of large scale in production and installment I don’t see new tech who can reduce price.

  95. Not by much or rather pretty much by industry initiative standards. Lots of places give free land to put up industry for one as it give workplaces and tax income. On the other hand some renewable has so high subsidies they has been caught cheating running the backup diesel generator 24/7 yes the payout for the electricity was so high it paid of to go to the gas station by diesel and burn it in the not very efficient generator to produce power that thing is probably less efficient than an modern car engine. It was discovered because solar plant produced power during night :)On the gripping hand solar works well to counter air condition power spikes.its the case there use and power production match well. Last that has caused the price reduction? cheaper solar panels I get that but wind outside of large scale in production and installment I don’t see new tech who can reduce price.

  96. This certainly will make a difference, but until the cost of large capacity power storage plus the cost of the renewable power is cheaper, it is not going to make a huge difference. By the way, the grid also needs improvement for renewable power to be used effectively.

  97. This certainly will make a difference but until the cost of large capacity power storage plus the cost of the renewable power is cheaper it is not going to make a huge difference. By the way the grid also needs improvement for renewable power to be used effectively.

  98. If this is true, the subsidies should be unnecessary. Rate payers using utilities that use more renewable power should see their rates go down. I see none these occuring to date. Something is wrong with this picture.

  99. If this is true the subsidies should be unnecessary. Rate payers using utilities that use more renewable power should see their rates go down. I see none these occuring to date. Something is wrong with this picture.

  100. Nobody who know enough about power grids, like electric companies, plans on 100% solar and wind. To start with, we have 26% of US electricity supplied by hydroelectric and nuclear. Another 6% comes from biomass, which is both renewable and dispatchable. Hydroelectric *already is storage*, by virtue of the water behind the dam. So when you consider the whole grid, and not just single sources in isolation, the need for storage is greatly reduced. > to make a grid that’s five-nines reliable Hell, my electric power is fairly reliable, but nowhere near five-nines. In a good year it is 4 nines, and in a bad year 99.8%. Ask Puerto Rico what their grid reliability was in the past year, or south Florida from the hurricanes that hit.

  101. Nobody who know enough about power grids like electric companies plans on 100{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} solar and wind. To start with we have 26{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} of US electricity supplied by hydroelectric and nuclear. Another 6{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} comes from biomass which is both renewable and dispatchable. Hydroelectric *already is storage* by virtue of the water behind the dam.So when you consider the whole grid and not just single sources in isolation the need for storage is greatly reduced.> to make a grid that’s five-nines reliableHell my electric power is fairly reliable but nowhere near five-nines. In a good year it is 4 nines and in a bad year 99.8{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12}. Ask Puerto Rico what their grid reliability was in the past year or south Florida from the hurricanes that hit.

  102. This is great, but it really doesn’t tell the whole story. If you want renewables to be used for any kind of dispatchable power, you have to factor in the cost of the storage required to make the primary capacity dispatchable. A quick-and-dirty way to compute this is to guess at how much of the energy from a renewable source has to go through a storage system in a grid dominated by renewables. The LCOE of renewables is $30/MWh, but the LCOE of stuff coming out of the storage systems (per fairly recent Lazard estimates for Li-ion battery farms) is about $270/MWh. If 30% has to come out of storage, then you get an average LCOE of $102/MWh. A better way to do this is to figure out the number of joules of storage you need per watt of generating capacity, then burden the capital cost of the renewables with the extra capital cost of the storage, and do your LCOE computation. That’s a bit beyond my competence, but maybe somebody else can take a crack at it? I’d estimate that, to make a grid that’s five-nines reliable out of mostly renewable sources, you’re going to need something like 6 joules of storage per watt of renewable capacity.

  103. This is great but it really doesn’t tell the whole story. If you want renewables to be used for any kind of dispatchable power you have to factor in the cost of the storage required to make the primary capacity dispatchable.A quick-and-dirty way to compute this is to guess at how much of the energy from a renewable source has to go through a storage system in a grid dominated by renewables. The LCOE of renewables is $30/MWh but the LCOE of stuff coming out of the storage systems (per fairly recent Lazard estimates for Li-ion battery farms) is about $270/MWh. If 30{22800fc54956079738b58e74e4dcd846757aa319aad70fcf90c97a58f3119a12} has to come out of storage then you get an average LCOE of $102/MWh.A better way to do this is to figure out the number of joules of storage you need per watt of generating capacity then burden the capital cost of the renewables with the extra capital cost of the storage and do your LCOE computation. That’s a bit beyond my competence but maybe somebody else can take a crack at it? I’d estimate that to make a grid that’s five-nines reliable out of mostly renewable sources you’re going to need something like 6 joules of storage per watt of renewable capacity.

  104. It would be interesting to see an analysis of how much this projected lowering in cost of renewable energy will be subsidized by fossil fuel inputs… The transition away from fossil fuels is inevitable, but we need to be realistic about what it’s going to take to replace them.

  105. Pumped hydro is great if you have the right geography, but mostly you don’t.

    I’m not sure I’m understanding what you’re saying about “stored gas either LNG”. Compressed air storage is nowhere near economical unless you have exactly the right geology and, even then, you have to burn gas to get the turbine efficiency up during the expansion.

    If you’re simply saying that we can put a gas peaker behind the renewable capacity, that’s true, but it’s also really expensive. The capital costs are pretty high, and you’d be looking at capacity factors in the <5% range, instead of the 30% that is usually assumed to make them viable. The current peaker systems have LCOE's that are almost $80/MWh. Chop their capacity factors by a factor of six or seven and you're probably better off using batteries--which brings me back to my point: Cheap renewable nameplate capacity doesn't mean much--you have to look at cost to deliver energy over the grid.

  106. One of the problems with wind power is that the global trend is lessening winds, perhaps caused by warming. CO2 caused warming is predicted to be greatest in the coldest regions of the planet, reducing the temperature differences between regions which cause winds.

  107. Except for those pesky issues of land use, non-reliability, positioning far away from areas of consumption, backup power requirements, seasonal decreases, lack of correspondence of power output vs power need. A 3 cent kilowatt-hour is meaningless if it’s not there when you need it. Backup fast response gas turbine power runs 3 cents per every kw-hr produced by wind or solar. Here in the mid Atlantic coal and nuclear power wholesale for around 3 cents.

  108. If you have hydro or stored gas either LNG, caves or even the field if you can change output fast you don’t need much storage, just switch mode like on an plugin hybrid car.

    Now gas is an case in it self, in many cases its an by product of oil and dirt cheap as you have to use it or touch it. Other fields are primarily gas with some oil you collect in trucks.

  109. The nuke and hydro capacity obviously strongly affects that “how many joules per watt” figure of merit, but even with nuke and hydro available in some regions, that number isn’t going to drop below 3 or 4, and it’ll be higher in areas where the nukes and hydro aren’t available.

    The thing is that it’s pretty easy to let fossil sources backfill on the occasional calm and/or cloudy day when the renewables are 30% of capacity, but that’s gonna change in a steeply non-linear fashion as you get closer and closer to full decarbonization.

    If you can reduce the problem to that joules/watt kind of formulation, you can get a very precise handle on what your capital costs are going to be. And if you know the capex, you can compute a system-wide LCOE quite precisely. But waving $0.03/kWh around as if it means anything without burdening it with the stuff you need for grid reliability is pretty dishonest.

    On the number of nines: I’ll give you four nines, but anything lower than that starts to have a real economic impact. Availability is usually computed as:

    ((total customer minutes) – (total outage customer minutes)) / (total customer minutes).

    That means that point outages don’t change your reliability much, but systemic outages deeper in the network hurt a lot. A calm/cloudy day is by definition about as deep into the network as you can get.

  110. Not by much or rather pretty much by industry initiative standards.
    Lots of places give free land to put up industry for one as it give workplaces and tax income.

    On the other hand some renewable has so high subsidies they has been caught cheating running the backup diesel generator 24/7, yes the payout for the electricity was so high it paid of to go to the gas station by diesel and burn it in the not very efficient generator to produce power, that thing is probably less efficient than an modern car engine.
    It was discovered because solar plant produced power during night 🙂

    On the gripping hand solar works well to counter air condition power spikes.
    its the case there use and power production match well.

    Last that has caused the price reduction? cheaper solar panels I get that, but wind, outside of large scale in production and installment I don’t see new tech who can reduce price.

  111. This certainly will make a difference, but until the cost of large capacity power storage plus the cost of the renewable power is cheaper, it is not going to make a huge difference. By the way, the grid also needs improvement for renewable power to be used effectively.

  112. If this is true, the subsidies should be unnecessary. Rate payers using utilities that use more renewable power should see their rates go down. I see none these occuring to date. Something is wrong with this picture.

  113. Nobody who know enough about power grids, like electric companies, plans on 100% solar and wind. To start with, we have 26% of US electricity supplied by hydroelectric and nuclear. Another 6% comes from biomass, which is both renewable and dispatchable. Hydroelectric *already is storage*, by virtue of the water behind the dam.

    So when you consider the whole grid, and not just single sources in isolation, the need for storage is greatly reduced.

    > to make a grid that’s five-nines reliable

    Hell, my electric power is fairly reliable, but nowhere near five-nines. In a good year it is 4 nines, and in a bad year 99.8%. Ask Puerto Rico what their grid reliability was in the past year, or south Florida from the hurricanes that hit.

  114. This is great, but it really doesn’t tell the whole story. If you want renewables to be used for any kind of dispatchable power, you have to factor in the cost of the storage required to make the primary capacity dispatchable.

    A quick-and-dirty way to compute this is to guess at how much of the energy from a renewable source has to go through a storage system in a grid dominated by renewables. The LCOE of renewables is $30/MWh, but the LCOE of stuff coming out of the storage systems (per fairly recent Lazard estimates for Li-ion battery farms) is about $270/MWh. If 30% has to come out of storage, then you get an average LCOE of $102/MWh.

    A better way to do this is to figure out the number of joules of storage you need per watt of generating capacity, then burden the capital cost of the renewables with the extra capital cost of the storage, and do your LCOE computation. That’s a bit beyond my competence, but maybe somebody else can take a crack at it? I’d estimate that, to make a grid that’s five-nines reliable out of mostly renewable sources, you’re going to need something like 6 joules of storage per watt of renewable capacity.

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