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Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

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Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of that comment attributed to Bill Gates: "64k memory ought to be enough for everybody" The trend is very clear: solar and wind are dropping in prices. It's now only a matter of when, not if.

They can drop to zero, they are still not going to replace regular power plants because you can't guarantee baseline power with them. You could drop all power generated with them into pumping water to huge reservoirs, so they can generate baseline power around the clock, but it's not feasible in a lot of places, and you are losing a lot of energy just to move the water up and down.

Not sure whether you're just using the term incorrectly, but I see this claim repeated a lot so forgive me for explaining: you do not need baseline power.

Baseline power is the observation that if we have less than ideal power plants that need to run 24/7 to be economical (usually because of high capital costs, e.g. nuclear plants), we can still deploy them if we then also invest in other plants for filling in the peaks.

See, the important part here is that you always need to meet demand (maybe you can shift demand around a bit, but after shifting it the observation still holds).

If you have baseline plants, your supply curve is a flat line so the peaks in the demand are the holes you need to fill in somehow.

With a renewable source like wind or solar, you may actually be able to meet the peak demand, but then have a hole in the supply at some other point (say at night, or when there's no wind). So you need to fill in these somehow (as you say).

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#122
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fossil fuels get on the order of 100+ billion per year in direct and indirect subsidies in the US as a conservative estimate . By far the largest subsides for 'Green Energy' go to corn ethanol which is mostly political football. After that there really more rounding errors than anything else. PS: Nuclear seems to be popular on a lot of tech sites, but it needs massive subsides to come close to break even.

I'm not saying you're wrong (and I think you're right), but do you have a source for the "fossil fuels get $100billion+ in subsidies" and "Nuclear needs massive subsidies to come close to break even"?

For nuclear:

> A new 3,260 MW Hinkley Point C nuclear power station was given planning consent on 19 March 2013.[10] A guaranteed "strike price" of £92.50 per megawatt-hour (to be indexed for inflation over 45 years) was announced on 21 October 2013. The new power station would see Hinkley's contribution to the country's power supply rise to 7%.[9] At the time of the planning consent, the price for electric energy on the wholesale market was around £45 per megawatt-hour while the new power plant was expected to need earnings of £90 per megawatt-hour in order to break even.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_B_Nuclear_Power_...

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#123
post #88
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You did miss two things - distribution networks and industrial customers. Those are the two problems that nobody seems to be solving yet. Basically, high-voltage electricity is distributed with networks that are dumb and old. The generation and usage is very carefully balanced with heavy users and large producers, because the network does not have storage capacity. It also has very little tolerance for power imbalanc…

Regarding customers such as aluminum smelters: I wonder if nature could cope if we used fossil fuels for only them. Another thing, while wind/solar might might be approaching the cost of fossil fuels I suspect the story may be different for developing countries. In South Africa we have power capacity problems and what was the decision? Build the biggest coal power plant in the southern hemisphere. If we want to solve…

Actually, yes. Global atmospheric CO2 concentrations will (probably) stabilize if we reduce output to about 5% of the current level, by outflow to the deep ocean (which is a vast reservoir). But that is still very difficult to reach, especially with business as usual.

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#124
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying you're wrong (and I think you're right), but do you have a source for the "fossil fuels get $100billion+ in subsidies" and "Nuclear needs massive subsidies to come close to break even"?

For nuclear: > A new 3,260 MW Hinkley Point C nuclear power station was given planning consent on 19 March 2013.[10] A guaranteed "strike price" of £92.50 per megawatt-hour (to be indexed for inflation over 45 years) was announced on 21 October 2013. The new power station would see Hinkley's contribution to the country's power supply rise to 7%.[9] At the time of the planning consent, the price for electric energy on…

Up north the latest nuclear plant guarantees price for its owners at 50 EUR/MWh (37 GBP) or less: http://www.energypost.eu/rosatom-signs-contract-build-nuclea...

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of that comment attributed to Bill Gates: "64k memory ought to be enough for everybody" The trend is very clear: solar and wind are dropping in prices. It's now only a matter of when, not if.

Except that he didn't say that at all and has given extremely detailed accounts of the current thinking at the time in history (they were already looking towards the upcoming limitations and bottlenecks they would face in expanding RAM sizes). Although it is true that solar and wind are dropping in prices recently I don't think an urban legend misquote has any relevance.

Which is why I said that it is "attributed" to Bill Gates. I know he didn't say it

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#126

Wind and solar are still not competitive. The report says that coal costs $75 per megawatt hour, while land-based wind costs $83 and solar comes in at a whopping $122. That's far from "almost competitive". Also note that these are not costs of production , these are what people wind up paying for it. That means that the coal numbers include extensive taxes, while the solar and wind numbers include extensive tax disco…

>The report says that coal costs $75 per megawatt hour, while land-based wind costs $83 and solar comes in at a whopping $122. That's far from "almost competitive". $83 is close enough to $75 that tweaks to tax policy can now be used to make renewable energy investment over fossil fuel virtually a no brainer decision without adversely affecting overall energy production that much. Indeed, that's pretty much what Germ…

Germany main source of energy is still, by far, coal (lignite to be precise), and it's not going down yet. The expansion of renewable energy, which is very real, is being done at the expense of nuclear energy.

I wish they would be doing it the other way around: closing coal power plants before the nuclear ones. But Germany has lignite, and doesn't have much of a nuclear industry, so economically it makes much more sense that way...

EDIT: typo

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that he didn't say that at all and has given extremely detailed accounts of the current thinking at the time in history (they were already looking towards the upcoming limitations and bottlenecks they would face in expanding RAM sizes). Although it is true that solar and wind are dropping in prices recently I don't think an urban legend misquote has any relevance.

Which is why I said that it is "attributed" to Bill Gates. I know he didn't say it

In the future you might want say 'misattributed' or 'wrongly attributed' for this case.

The term 'attributed to X' can mean "is widely but wrongly attributed to X", but can also mean "I heard it somewhere and it sounds true so I'll go with my gut feeling instead of verifying it" or "I hear there are doubts, so while I have no opinion, I'll keep my bases covered."

Personally, rather than be stuck in that mire, I would suggest quoting Prof. Frink from Simpsons:

> 'I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.'

This in turn came from the quote widely but wrongly attributed to Thomas J. Watson of IBM:

> 'I think there is a world market for maybe five computers'

Quoting from https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson :

> Often dated to 1943. Thorough research of Watson's writings and statements have produced no example of him saying this. It appears to be a corruption of a remark by Howard Aiken that four or five computers could meet all of the United Kingdom's computing needs. See Ralph Keyes (2006), The Quote Verifier.

Of these, only the Frink version has an accurate attribution. I think the other two come with some malice. By repeating the urban legend as if it's relevant, I think you are forwarding that malice, even if unintentionally.

Re: Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

#129

Wind and solar are still not competitive. The report says that coal costs $75 per megawatt hour, while land-based wind costs $83 and solar comes in at a whopping $122. That's far from "almost competitive". Also note that these are not costs of production , these are what people wind up paying for it. That means that the coal numbers include extensive taxes, while the solar and wind numbers include extensive tax disco…

> Also note that these are not costs of production, these are what people wind up paying for it

Cost of production and what people pay are two different things. A true accounting would include cost of production and externalized costs. Doing that doubles the price of coal: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/tallying-coals-hid...

> Even the study’s most conservative estimate of the uncounted cost of coal — $175 billion a year — would more than double the average cost of coal-fired electricity, the authors found.

And most of that is from well-understood and well-measured health impacts of coal pollution:

> At this lower range, roughly 80 percent of the costs were from well-documented public health impacts like lung and heart disease

So you pay $75 per megawatt hour for coal. And then the poor sap who lives downwind of the coal plant pays another $75 per megawatt hour for your electricity use in the form of dying early from lung cancer.

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