Unsubsidized Renewables Now Cheaper Than Subsidized Fossil F

[MiM]

“... clean energy is a game changer which promises to turn the economics of power systems on its head,” he said.

That's what it's always been about - an economic shift in the power structure (taking power away from big oil and putting into big green). The fact that coal is now more expensive not because of scarcity of resources, but rather difficulty of financing is the green icing on the cake.

So, the question I have is can they produce enough power to replace gas, oil, and coal plants entirely with wind and solar? Diseconomy of scale tells me no.

Places like Germany and Sweden are on the road to doing that. Australia could have been if we had of transitioned from a coal economy to a renewable economy last century. It would help if we had nuclear as well, at least to plug the gap until renewables could take over the whole lot.

Sweden's electricity production is all hydro and nuclear. Wind is negligible, and sun is almost as impossible as in Finland.

One important advance will be more efficient energy storage solutions that help to smooth out the inevitable peaks and troughs of sources like wind and solar...

Not "one important". "The most important". This was a true revelation by Robert Heinlein when he introduced the shipstones in his novel Friday. The real problem isn't necessarily producing energy, but storing and transferring it.

BTW: How are your solar panels doing Jim?

[Blind groper]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_ ... _by_source

Above is an alternative reference for the cost of generating electricity by various methods. This is more comprehensive, so I summarise below as American cents per kilowatt hour of electricity generated.

Except for nuclear, these are old fashioned methods. I am not sure why they did not list old fashioned nuclear.

Gas 7 cents.
Hydroelectricity, geothermal and wind 9
Coal 10
Advanced nuclear 11
Solar panels 14

I have been following this site for a few years, and it is worth noting that all of these have come down in cost, but wind and solar more than others as a percentage of earlier costs.

[pErvinalia]

The production costs, every single aspect, is dependant upon having access to cheap carbons. Once excessive price increases kick in the capacity to upscale will no longer be there. This isn't a chicken-egg issue since there is only ever gonna be a egg.

What? You're not making any sense. Carbon isn't cheap now. That's the whole fucking point of the story. And once scales increase, the whole lot will get cheaper to manufacture and the energy from coal will be replaced with wind/solar.

[pErvinalia]

I'm not sure you are correct that they are going to become more expensive. If they are cheaper already (including manufacturing costs), then how do they become more expensive? Additionally, they will become even more cheaper with bigger scales of production. Not to mention that eventually coal/oil/gas will have a carbon price attached to it.

Diseconomy of scale, of a sort. A windfarm / solarfarm large enough to power, say, Melbourne, would be enormous and consist of numerous physically independent generators which would occupy an enormous area. The cost of maintenance alone will be huge as there is no possible physical centralization (fossil fuel plants take advantage of economy of scale - the larger they are, the cheaper they are to run). Manufacturing costs will surely fall due to economy of scale in production, but maintenance is where it will all fall down IMO.

Wind turbines have their own generator in the unit. Therefore you can't have centralisation for wind power. You are right this will lead to more maintenance costs. Although, a generator is a pretty simple thing. Built with the right parts it shouldn't need much maintenance.

Solar, well it depends on what technology you are talking about. With solar thermal, you can have a single sterling generator per plant. Or you could store the energy and then generate the electricity in a separate generator. Solar PV, doesn't need a generator at all.

Not sure you've really thought this through properly.

[pErvinalia]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_ ... _by_source

Above is an alternative reference for the cost of generating electricity by various methods. This is more comprehensive, so I summarise below as American cents per kilowatt hour of electricity generated.

Except for nuclear, these are old fashioned methods. I am not sure why they did not list old fashioned nuclear.

Gas 7 cents.
Hydroelectricity, geothermal and wind 9
Coal 10
Advanced nuclear 11
Solar panels 14

I have been following this site for a few years, and it is worth noting that all of these have come down in cost, but wind and solar more than others as a percentage of earlier costs.

And coal/oil/gas will begin to rise as carbon pricing becomes more widespread.

Interesting to see how expensive nuclear is. I would have thought it was cheaper than that.

[PsychoSerenity]

Interesting to see how expensive nuclear is. I would have thought it was cheaper than that.

I expect it would have to be rather more again if they ever bothered to account for the fact that someone will need to securely store the waste for the next 10,000 years.

[Blind groper]

Nuclear waste is not much of a technical problem. It is mainly a political problem, because the morons in society keep stopping governments implementing long term storage options.

The cost of nuclear is in the same ballpark as most other mainstream generating techniques. The cost is high for some fashionable methods, like solar thermal (apparently it costs an absolute fortune to keep the reflecting mirrors clean) or for offshore wind power.

The cheapest method currently, head and shoulders superior to anything else, is natural gas. Of course, that carries a greenhouse gas penalty.

Wind and solar cell carry the penalty of intermittency.

[MiM]

Nuclear waste is not much of a technical problem. It is mainly a political problem, because the morons in society keep stopping governments implementing long term storage options.

Not everywhere http://www.posiva.fi/en. BTW, Its not the government that's implementing. It is the power companies. The government is just looking after that everything is done safely and securely. The cost is covered by a fund that gets its money from the selling of nuclear electricity. So I am already paying for all that in my electricity bill.

Sweden is not much behind us, btw.

[macdoc]

securely store the waste for the next 10,000 years.

Put that in perspective....
We are storing the C02 waste from fossil fuel for 100,000 years in our atmosphere

Nature Reports Climate Change
Published online: 20 November 2008 | doi:10.1038/climate.2008.122
Carbon is forever
Carbon dioxide emissions and their associated warming could linger for millennia, according to some climate scientists. Mason Inman looks at why the fallout from burning fossil fuels could last far longer than expected.

http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0812 ... 8.122.html
and there is a hellish amount more sitting around releasing radiation and heavy metals into the environment in coal fired plants residue holding areas.

lovely stuff


In addition the scale of the spent nuclear rods which is what people are terming high level waste is exceptionally small.
ALL of this since the nuclear age began 60 years ago would fit in a football pitch 3m deep. ( and go off with a fucking great bang )
This is not waste.
a) the rods themselves can be recycled ( NOX ) and have been but currently it's cheaper to mine new
b) and IFR reactor can use the material and extract 95% of the remaining energy from them and reduce the resulting size of the material by 90% and shorten the half life very significantly.

An IFR can handle the output of several light water reactors. Needs doing.

Solar tho is going at such a pace that it is destabilizing power markets - notably in Spain and also in Germany.

This release tho was a shocker...

Deutsche Bank Says Solar is Approaching Grid Parity
By PERRY SIOSHANSI on September 05, 2013 at 2:30 PM
HUSUM 2012 Wind Energy Trade Fair

It’s no longer, if, but rather when.

In study released in late July 2013, DB’s US-based Vishal Shah estimates that three-quarters of the world’s solar market will be “sustainable” within 18 months, meaning they can operate with little or no subsidy. In 2 years, he reckons, the market will have flipped from one being largely “unsustainable” – needing big subsidies – to one being mostly sustainable. (graph below). Whether the market will indeed flip as Mr. Shah predicts or not, is debatable. Most likely, the flipping will happen gradually, with solar becoming cost-competitive with grid-generated power starting in high retail regions first.

http://breakingenergy.com/2013/09/05/de ... id-parity/

The problem now becomes one of both cost and transmission.

To fully engage renewables requires a grid change.

Natural gas is the best bridge technology as the turbines are relatively cheap, small and can be turned on and off quickly.
They are one reason that the US emissions dropped 11% last year as natural gas replaced coal in a some areas.

Big coal is in serious retreat and that is where effort should be focused.

•••

I find this deliciously ironic

Billionaire Bill Koch took the stand Friday against an allegedly fraudulent winemaker he claims duped him — saying the experience led to him spending $25 million on his own “personal crusade” to rid the world of vino counterfeiters.
“I want to shine a bright light on the false wine business. There’s a code of silence around it,” the 73-year-old Florida-based fossil-fuel tycoon told reporters on Friday after testifying in Manhattan federal court as the government’s star witness against Rudy Kurniawan.

http://nypost.com/2013/12/14/scammed-bi ... ine-fraud/

The guy that funds the climate change denier industry to the tune of 10s of millions of dollars or more....want's to "clean up" the wine industry.

He has made billions polluting the environment buying politicians and when he gets dinged personally on a rich man's fancy good he's all for gov reg.

[cronus]

The production costs, every single aspect, is dependant upon having access to cheap carbons. Once excessive price increases kick in the capacity to upscale will no longer be there. This isn't a chicken-egg issue since there is only ever gonna be a egg.

What? You're not making any sense. Carbon isn't cheap now. That's the whole fucking point of the story. And once scales increase, the whole lot will get cheaper to manufacture and the energy from coal will be replaced with wind/solar.

The stuff that is required to make the renewable stuff is going to become much more expensive before the renewable stuff can be made in sufficient quantities to forestall a population die-off/social chaoes/economic meltdown/productive capacity collapse/TSHTF, including the folk making the renewable stuff inside the vortex of catastrophic civilization collapse. On a good day you can see the airport from a plane that is nose-diving into the ocean....doesn't mean you can 'teleport' to the safety of the airport though. Which is what you are proposing as a possibility. Consider how expensive electric cars are now? In five years time they won't have upscaled but the effects of peak oil which kicked in around the mid two thousands will have done. The bumpy plateau of peak oil production, maintained by ephemeral fracking etc, doesn't lead to more oil - it leads to less, and a collapse in productive capacity, technical sophistication etc will follow that pretty quick.

[Warren Dew]

I'm not sure you are correct that they are going to become more expensive. If they are cheaper already (including manufacturing costs), then how do they become more expensive? Additionally, they will become even more cheaper with bigger scales of production. Not to mention that eventually coal/oil/gas will have a carbon price attached to it.

The wind estimates are almost certainly based on the most favorable sites - places with moderately high, steady winds that are easy to get to and convenient to the consumers. As the best sites are used up, wind will become more expensive per unit electricity generated.

That said, a carbon tax is definitely a step in the right direction - as long as you don't think we're going to need the CO2 to stave off the overdue next ice age.

ignore this post if you don't believe in the free market, of course, since all this is based on libertarian free market principles.

[macdoc]

as long as you don't think we're going to need the CO2 to stave off the overdue next ice age.

we already did.

[pErvinalia]

The production costs, every single aspect, is dependant upon having access to cheap carbons. Once excessive price increases kick in the capacity to upscale will no longer be there. This isn't a chicken-egg issue since there is only ever gonna be a egg.

What? You're not making any sense. Carbon isn't cheap now. That's the whole fucking point of the story. And once scales increase, the whole lot will get cheaper to manufacture and the energy from coal will be replaced with wind/solar.

The stuff that is required to make the renewable stuff is going to become much more expensive before the renewable stuff can be made in sufficient quantities to forestall a population die-off/social chaoes/economic meltdown/productive capacity collapse/TSHTF, including the folk making the renewable stuff inside the vortex of catastrophic civilization collapse. On a good day you can see the airport from a plane that is nose-diving into the ocean....doesn't mean you can 'teleport' to the safety of the airport though. Which is what you are proposing as a possibility. Consider how expensive electric cars are now? In five years time they won't have upscaled but the effects of peak oil which kicked in around the mid two thousands will have done. The bumpy plateau of peak oil production, maintained by ephemeral fracking etc, doesn't lead to more oil - it leads to less, and a collapse in productive capacity, technical sophistication etc will follow that pretty quick.

You are not making any sense. Again.

[Svartalf]

Just think of it, you need lots of rare earths to make solar panels, nor are windmills that low tech... those things are expensive to make and will get more so.

[cronus]

I'll make more sense later I guess? You're the dead walking.