A comparison of both the Capital Cost and Energy Producing Effectiveness of the Renewable Energy investments of the USA, Germany and the UK.
Guest essay by Ed Hoskins
The summary diagram below collates the cost and capacity factors of Renewable Energy power sources compared to the cost and output capacity of conventional Gas Fired Electricity generation.
The associated base data is shown below:
In summary, these figures show that these three Western nations have spent of the order of at least ~$0.5trillion in capital costs alone, (conservatively estimated, only accounting for the primary capital costs ), to create Renewable Energy electrical generating capacity.
Nominally, this total nameplate generating capacity at ~153GW should amount to about ~26% of their total electricity generation, were it fully effective. However, because of there is an inevitable ~20% capacity factor applicable across the board for all renewables, the actual cumulative energy output by from these Renewable sources only results in ~5% of the total electricity generation for these nations.
Across the board overall solar energy is about ~34 times the cost of comparable standard Gas Fired generation and 9 times less effective.
Wind-Power is only ~12 times the comparable cost and about 4 times less effective.
The same total electrical energy output could have been produced using conventional natural gas fired electrical generation for ~$31 billion or ~1/16 of the actual capital costs expended on renewable installations. Had conventional Gas Fired technology had been used, the full ~31 GW generating capacity would have provided non-intermittent and wholly dispatchable electricity production generated as and when needed.
The following calculations only provide conservative estimates of Renewable Energy installation capital costs. They discount entirely the major additional costs of:
- supporting backup generation
- connection to the grid from remote locations
- the large differentials in ongoing maintenance costs.
As all Renewable Energy technologies are only viable with the support of costly government subsidies, market intervention and market manipulation, can this be a responsible use of public funds or a good reason for increasing energy costs for individuals or industry in the Western world ?
The following data sources for the USA, Germany and the UK were reviewed:
United States of America: data available 2000 – 2012
Germany: data available from 1990 to 2013
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
United Kingdom: data available 2008 – 2013
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_Kingdom
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Kingdom
Note: the Wikipedia sources are used because they normally have a green orientation and are unlikely to be questioned by the advocates of Man-made Global Warming.
These data listed above provide installed “nameplate” capacity measured in Megawatts (MW) and energy output measured across the year in total Gigawatt hours, (GWh). Thus they do not provide directly comparable values as Megawatt nameplate capacity and the actual energy outputs achieved. For this comparative exercise the annual Gigawatt hours values were revised back to equivalent Megawatts, accounting for the 8,760 hours in the year, as indicated by Prof David MacKay in “Sustainable Energy – without the hot air”, page 334.
Although this measure eliminates the unpredictable and variable effects of intermittency and non-dispatchability that characterise Renewable Energy sources, it gives a conservative comparative value of the actual energy output and thus potentially available.
It allows for the calculation of capacity factors in relation to Renewable Energy technologies in each nation. The following graph shows the history of Renewable Energy (Solar and Wind power combined) installations and shows the progress year by year of actual electrical energy generated. 
The Energy Information Association provides the capital cost information in US$ for the USA. These capital costs are used for comparative purposes, but they take no account of currency variations and other local financial factors.
The USA Energy Information Association publishes comprehensive information on the capital costs of alternate electrical generation technologies, in Table 1 of their 2013 report. From that full list these notes consider three technologies:
- Large Scale Photovoltaic: this is the most economic of the PV technologies at ~$3.8 billion / GW.
- Combined Wind 80-20: merged onshore 80% and offshore 20% wind at ~$3.0 billion / GW.
- Natural Gas Advanced Combined Cycle: the costliest technical option at ~$1.0 billion / GW.
“Overnight Capital Cost”, (just as if an power generating installation has been created overnight), is the standard comparative measure for capital costs used in energy industries. The specific Overnight Capital Costs used include:
- Civil and structural costs
- Mechanical equipment supply and installation
- Electrical and instrumentation and control
- Project indirect costs
- Other owners costs: design studies, legal fees, insurance costs, property taxes and local electrical linkages to the Grid.
However for this comparison “Overnight Capital Costs” specifically do not include:
- Provision of Back-up power supply, “spinning reserve” for times when renewable power is unavailable.
- Fuel costs for actual generation and the spinning reserve
- Remote access costs
- Extended electrical linkages to the Grid
- Maintenance
- Financing etc.
These further costs for Renewable Energy excluded from Overnight Capital Costs mean that its use probably significantly less economic than the comparisons provided in these tables. In addition for these comparisons the Energy Information Association data denominated in US$ is used. These brief results are primarily for comparative purposes and do not purport to give precise actual expenditures in the various nations and by governments. However, they do clearly indicate the order of magnitude of the capital sums involved.
They also allow for the calculation of comparative figures to be established between renewable energy generation and standard Gas Fired electricity generation. The results for the individual Nations in tabular form using the EIA Overnight Capital Cost data are shown below: 
In graphic terms the results for renewable Energy generation in each country is shown below.
Solar power is comparatively successful in the USA, because it is mainly installed in Southerly latitudes, but in Germany its very serious renewable investment in Solar amounting to more than 50% of all renewables is twice as expensive and half as effective as in the USA. Solar energy in the UK is 55 times more expensive and half as effective again as in Germany. Fortunately the UK only has about 25% solar generation in the Renewable mix. Wind power is about 26% effective in the USA and about 11 times more costly than Gas Fired generation. In Germany Wind power at less than 50% of its renewable commitment is 50% more expensive and substantially less effective in the USA. Wind power in the UK is also about 11 times more costly, similar to the USA, and rather more effective than in Germany, because of wind conditions.
In addition, there is also a very large discrepancy in maintenance costs shown in the Energy Information Association table 1. When compared to a standard Natural Gas plant, maintenance cost comparisons are as follows:
- Photovoltaics times ~1.6
- Onshore Wind-Power times ~2.6
- Offshore Wind Power times ~4.9
- Combined Wind 80 – 20 times ~4.0
- Coal (without CCS) times ~1.9 (included for reference)
- Nuclear times ~6.1 (included for reference)
There are also significant questions to be answered about the longevity and engineering robustness of the Solar and Wind-Power technologies: this is particularly problematical for off-shore wind farms.
In addition a more detailed analysis might well indicate that, in spite of the cost of fuel being essentially free, the development, fabrication and installation of both Solar and Wind-power installations involves the release of substantial amounts of CO2. The actual savings of CO2 emissions may be hardly exceeded over their installed working life of these Renewable technologies.
http://sunweber.blogspot.fr/2014/11/prove-this-wrong.htm
Intermittancy and Non-dipatchability
However there still remains a further major problem with all Renewable Energy sources. Their electrical output is intermittent and non dispatchable. Their electrical output cannot respond to electricity demand as and when needed. Energy is contributed to the grid in a haphazard manner dependent on the weather. This effect can seen from German electrical supply in the diagram below, for a week in August 2014, an optimum period for any solar energy input. Power certainly not necessarily available whenever required.
- http://notrickszone.com/2014/07/21/germanys-habitually-awol-green-energy-installed-windsolar-often-delivers-less-than-1-of-rated-capacity/
- http://www.agora-energiewende.org/service/recent-electricity-data/stromerzeugung-und-verbrauch/
- http://www.ukpowergeneration.info
Solar power inevitably varies according to the time of day, the state of the weather and also of course radically with the seasons. Solar power works most effectively in latitudes nearer the equator and it certainly cannot be seriously effective in Northern Europe. In the example above in August 2014 wind power input varied from 15.5 GW to 0.18 GW and the Solar contribution varied from nil to some 15 GW. Thus this Renewable Energy variability combined with the “Renewables Obligation”, which mandates that the electricity grid has to take energy from renewable sources preferentially, if available, resulted in demands on conventional generation in Germany varying from ~23GW to ~47GW over the period. In Germany, its massive commitment to solar energy can briefly provide up to ~20% of country wide demand for a few hours either side of noon on some fine summer days, but at the time of maximum power demand on winter evenings solar energy input is necessarily nil. But at the same time the output from wind power is equally variable as in the summer months.
Germany has similar insolation and cloudiness characterists as Alaska and the UK being even further North has an even worse solar performance. Electricity generation from wind turbines is equally fickle, as in the week in July 2014, clearly shown above, where Wind-Power input across Germany was close to zero for several days. Similarly an established high pressure system, with little wind over the whole of Northern Europe is a common occurrence in winter months, when electricity demand is at its highest. Conversely, on occasions Renewable Energy output may be in excess of demand and this has to dumped expensively and unproductively. This is especially so, as there is still no solution to electrical energy storage on a sufficiently large industrial scale. That is the reason that the word “nominally” is used throughout these notes in relation to the name plate capacity outputs from Renewable Energy sources.
Overall these three major nations that have committed massive investments to Renewable Energy. Conservatively this amounts to at least ~$0.5 trillion or ~2.2% of combined annual GDP.
This investment has resulted in a “nominal” ~31Gigawatts of generating capacity from an installed Nameplate Capacity of ~150Gigawatts. This is “nominally” almost a quarter of the total installed nameplate generating capacity.
But this nominal 31GW of Renewable Energy output is ~5.4% of the total installed generating capacity of ~570Gigawatts. Even that 31GW of Renewable Energy production is not really as useful as one would wish, because of its intermittency and non-dispatchability.
They didn’t listen six year ago. Here’s a surprisingly ‘skeptic’ article in the Guardian from August 2008.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2008/aug/08/thecostofrenewables
If the philosophy of this piece was extrapolated, every energy plant constructed in any part of these three countries would be of one type. They would be all gas, or all coal, or all nuclear. But each type of production has its own characteristics, so producers have a mix to take advantage of each.
It should give the essayist pause to consider that companies building their own wind power installations are doing so with their own funds. They know about the intermittancy. They know about power factors. They know about the maintenance required. They know about transmission losses. They know about reserve capacity requirements. They know statistically how much the wind blows what direction and how hard. They know what the out put will be. They know what the power source will do to their system. They also know about the subsidy and the renewable energy credits.
They do the economic analysis of all these factors, and factors that none of us know about, in more detail than anyone commenting here knows about (because much of what they know is proprietary – if any of their engineers is reading this discussion they cannot comment) and they decide to invest their own funds in the project.
There is a net advantage to these projects or they would not be constructed. Which should give the essayist some pause.
You seemed quite intelligent for part of that … whatever it was. Why are you talking through your hat?
Chris
It is called Alround Guaranteed Wincome or AGW. Paid by the collective (or government, take your pick) to the plant operator. How can one refuse?
The energy market is not truly functional because electricity is not a commodity. It cannot be stored (ok hydro pumps but that is restrained by geography and expensive).
Yet the grid requires smooth flows of electricity – not dropping out or ramping up unexpectedly. Thus there is a clear requirement for easily turn-off-and-onable power sources that can be relied upon. Wind and Solar don’t so that. Therefore, they ought to be paying a premium to get into the system at all. And they do – but it is paid for by Governments through legislation or subsidy.
And as they are more diffuse than power plants (you have to catch all the winds not just transfer the fuel to the power plant) you need amore grid connections too. That conversion is an extra cost that isn’t put on the wind plant builders.
The choice to build wind may be rational but not necessarily beneficial for the consumer.
The grid inherently has variable demands for electricity. On a very large scale, the demands can be predicted reasonably well; response to the variable demand is a technical problem that is already handled minute to minute every day.
Wind can be predicted 24 hours ahead to within about 20% and better at shorter timescales: it’s fluctuation can be accommodated. It does not suddenly drop off.
Stand by for the variation in wind is not provided by turning a generator on and off. The excess capacity is throughout the system. No particular plant is varied to compensate for variations in the wind output: the entire system varies. There is no currently readily available technique for storage of large scale electricity. None is needed. Natural gas units can provide the fluctuation necessary as long as the amount of wind power is a small part of the system. The loss of efficiency converting to storage and converting back to electricity would make any system not worthwhile.
@chris
I was unable to find a comment I’d read a year or so ago to the effect that the grid as a whole could buffer local fluctuations in wind and sunshine. It said that experience was showing that these variations didn’t average out over even large geographical areas.
Anyway, here’s a comment from a 10/22/14 Judith Curry thread on this topic
Oops– Make that: “the grid as a whole could NOT buffer”
>There is a net advantage to these projects or they would not be constructed.
That is nonsense. They are doing so because renewable energy state mandate laws have been passed, and federal money makes the projects feasible.
Or maybe the don’t want the fines and jail time for state law as writen
.
Currently, 29 states have renewable electricity mandates (REM) and 7 states have renewable electricity goals. These mandates require utilities to sell or produce a certain percent of their electricity from sources defined as “renewable.”
And maybe you have no concept of Utility Boards setting rates, which have to be payed to the monopoly providers that guaranty a profit on your and every other purchaser’s electricity.
Chris4692 – in this you are mistaken. As a person who work with the “grid folks” wind and solar do not have to pay any of the increased costs that they force onto the market. They have gotten and get large tax breaks and many local and state subsidies provided by tax payer dollars and by everyone else who uses electricity paying higher rates to provide back up services for their intermittent product. The reliable prediction of wind and solar that you assert does not bear out in the actual numbers production numbers. search the latest report on the Ivanpah solar facility and its production was 50% of what was “reliably predicted” if your home was provided with only 50% of what was reliably predicted most likely you would have lots of wasted money in spoiled food from your non-electrified refrigerator. If you are actually curious there are many reports on the day to day performance of solar and wind generators by the actual grid operators.
Cheers,
Joe
The waste of all those taxpayer dollars is another reason the perpetrators of the AGW hoax should stand trial for crimes against humanity.
English quibble: As soon as anything becomes ONE time less, it vanishes, so any statement that something is “9 times less” (or whatever) is meaningless. (There is no problem whatever in saying that something is 9 times MORE. It’s only the negative that is wrong.) The only correct way to express the negative is to say that the alternative is only a ninth as effective. (I realize that this becomes more awkward for a number that includes a fraction, like 4.2…..)
Ian M
This morning’s Los Angeles Times reports that Bureau of Land Management has rejected the application from a Spanish company to construct a combined solar/wind energy project in California’s Silurian Valley.
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-1121-silurian-rejection-20141121-story.html
[begin quote]
The Bureau of Land Management on Thursday denied a Spanish company’s application to build a controversial renewable energy facility in the Mojave Desert’s remote Silurian Valley, deciding the sprawling project “would not be in the public interest.”
The closely watched decision is considered a bellwether for how the federal agency will handle future requests to develop renewable energy projects outside established development areas.
The company had planned a side-by-side wind and solar facility. Thursday’s decision applies only to the solar portion of the project. The wind energy aspect is still in the planning stages.
[…]
If the money that went into commercial efforts to integrate these technologies into the power grid had gone to homeowners, and allowed them to afford the hardware that would lower their monthly bills when paid off, the economy would have been bolstered in several ways, right at the grass roots level. The roofs of buildings are much more practical for solar panels than remote acreage where the environmental impact is higher. The need for grid integration equipt. is reduced to the consumer being required to provide automatic disconnection in case of service interruptions for safety. The load on the grid would be reduced as power was generated at the consumer end of the chain. Brownouts due to hot sunny days in urban areas would no doubt be reduced.
The way it works now, we’ll have to wait for trickle-down from the corporate profits to help the economy (thanks Ronnie), but negative numbers also seem to eventually trickle down also.
They don’t work under 3 feet of snow, they are a boondoggle in most of the USA.
Good point. They tap a resource that is not abundant enough to be universally practical.
In Germany, regular fuel ist taxed at almost 63%. The current fuel price is € 1,41 per liter, (that is US$ 5.33 per gallon). 88,22 ct/liter(or US$ 3.33 per gallon) is tax.
I designed, developed, built and operated power plants of all stripes for some forty years, twenty of those years doing “renewable” energy plants. I could quibble with a few of the author’s details, but the overall thrust of the work is dead on point. Wind power is an economic dog by any measure and solar is utterly absurd. I’ve also run the numbers using the most fantastical assumptions of fossil fuel price-escalators, alternate energy conversion efficiency improvements and remotely achievable capital cost reductions that green advocates could dream up; still “no contest”. The problem with wind and solar is always the same; “energy density”. There is simply too much physical material required for too little power output. End of story.
Bravo, Claude.
True Claude, thank you.
I wrote similar conclusions in 2002 that were confirmed by E.On Netz insightful “Wind Report 2005”:.
______________________
E.On Netz, in their report “Wind Power 2005” describes the problems.
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/eonwindreport2005.pdf
One of the greatest disadvantages of wind power is the need for almost 100% conventional backup. E.On Netz (the largest wind power generator in the world) says the “substitution capacity” in Germany was 8% in 2003, and will drop to 4% by 2020. See Figure 7 in the E.On report.
In concrete terms, this means that in 2020,
with a forecast wind power capacity of over
48,000MW (Source: dena grid study), 2,000MW of
traditional power production can be replaced by
these wind farms.
Another big problem with wind power is that power varies as the cube of the wind speed – this causes sharp peaks and valleys in the power output from wind farms, so extreme that it can cause the entire grid to crash – try that in winter – remember the 1998 ice storm? People died…
A near-miss occurred in German during Christmas week of 2004 – see Fig. 6 in the E.on report.
The feed-in capacity can change frequently
within a few hours. This is shown in FIGURE 6,
which reproduces the course of wind power feedin
during the Christmas week from 20 to 26
December 2004.
Whilst wind power feed-in at 9.15am on
Christmas Eve reached its maximum for the year
at 6,024MW, it fell to below 2,000MW within only
10 hours, a difference of over 4,000MW. This corresponds
to the capacity of 8 x 500MW coal fired
power station blocks. On Boxing Day, wind power
feed-in in the E.ON grid fell to below 40MW.
Handling such significant differences in feed-in
levels poses a major challenge to grid operators.
in summary, the problem with Wind Power is not just the Capacity Factor of about 20%, it is the Substitution Factor, which by 2020 in Germany is projected to be just 4%.
So Ed Hoskins, given that the Substitution Factor is the governing factor (in most wind power applications, and in in the absence or a super-battery), I suggest that the real capacity of wind power in Germany today is between 12.5 and 25 times less than gas-fired power, not 4.2.
Regards to all, Allan
Here’s the full article.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/google-engineers-explain-why-they-stopped-rd-in-renewable-energy
They could have figured this out with a few calculations on a back of a napkin, but had to spend a billion dollars in research and a new computer model to figure out the obvious. To be fair that billion was also used to make Google offset its carbon emissions which has close to zero as possible affect on CO2 concentrations. Google is still committed to spending big dollars on saving the planet from certain catastrophe by pursuing new technologies such as “…a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.” Makes sense, maybe a big balloon in space could suck up all the excess CO2. I wonder who controls the CO2 vacumn valve These guys also might like my idea of shooting ice cubes at the sun in order to reduce global temperature, or building a huge magnet in space to control the tilt of the earth or better yet, putting a mini Google inverter on everyone so that people provide energy as demonstrated in the Matrix movies.
Meanwhile another headline, “The_Moral Issueo f Climate change”,
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/11/19/the_moral_issue_of_climate_change_124697.html
This article has a ray of sunshine in it, I mean good sunshine, not like the bad sunshine that contributes to global warming. Here is an admission that climate change is not a scientific issue but a moral issue. Maybe alarmists can start a new moral majority. People of my age might remember when a small minority started a political action group to promote a religious agenda in government. If Jerry Falwell was alive, I wonder if he would support the climate change moral majority. Probably not, like one person’s junk is another person’s treasure, what one man may consider moral another may consider a mental disorder.
“…a method of extracting CO2 from the atmosphere and sequestering the carbon.”
Sounds like another Sequestered Carbon Accounting Method to me. Perhaps landfilling trees?
J a e: Like it! A great fla (four letter acronym)
A report from Google/Stanford Univ. engineers shows renewables will NEVER work based on math and physics instead of unicorn flatulence. The authors totally buy into the AGW theory but still say there is no hope.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/21/renewable_energy_simply_wont_work_google_renewables_engineers/
The numbers from Mann/EPA/Climate Fraud are all Gruber based.
Renewable Subsidies
WORLD ENERGY OUTLOOK 2014 FACTSHEET, How will global energy markets evolve to 2040?
World Energy Outlook International Energy Agency
Slides
Note: Slide 4/15 – EU electricity costs ~ 200% of China.
Slide 5/15 – US oil peaks ~ 2020 and declines to negligible by 2040. Major oil growth relies on the OPEC cartel!
Slide 10/15 – Major growth in Hydropower. Note Renewable Subsidies ~ $117 billion in 2030.
TomL, you beat me to it!
If only they would make the small step from ‘… there is no hope!’ to ‘.. well, actually, there is no need :)’. One small step for a man, one giant leap …’ (Sorry!)
No apologies necessary,phaedo. When the world awakes from CO2 hypnotism, we might actually enter an age of enlightenment where children are taught to think instead of programmed by propeganda.
OK… i just finished writing propaganda 50 times on the chalk board… can I go out on the playground?
on-grid supplement by PV solar can be cost effective in some locations….but you need hi sun flux (low latitude and low cloud cover average). here in Las Vegas, I put a 5kW PV system on our home after doing the calcs….with the fed tax 30% credit, the cash outlay is equivalent to a non-revocable CD (till house sale) that pays an 11% tax-free return (tax free since it is actually a discount in utility bills). without the fed credit, it is still a 7.7% tax-free return, which is better than one can do zero risk elsewhere in the markets. (and return goes up as utility rates increase). other points one can argue are the fairness of the state’s rules on net metering (the utility grid serves as a battery storage), which doesn’t reduce infrastructure needs for peak loading and the lack of a time-of-use metering (same purpose, would charge folks for peak loading), either of which would reduce cost effectiveness. still, southwest US (away from coastal cloud cover) is not bad for solar. i wouldn’t touch it in NE US or europe, though……
Jeff, your experience in Las Vegas pretty much tracks mine in Azusa, CA, and my mother’s in Sierra Vista, AZ. With current incentives, solar in the sunbelt makes economic sense for individual homeowners, though not necessarily for the society as a whole. If the green ideologues succeed in their attempt to make fossil energy prices skyrocket, solar will soon make economic sense without any incentives at all. But again, an advantage to individuals, at the expense of the country as a whole.
Jeff (for others too),
I encourage anyone thinking of PV solar to get a few solar lights and watch them for a year or so. As you indicate, the technology works in some places and not well in others.
I am at 47 XXX North and 2,200 feet elevation. I bought a box of small stick-in-the-ground solar lights that I’ve mounted on top of fence posts. In high-sun summer (we have short nights) those things produce light from dark to dawn. Now with low sun and a clear sky they light up for just a couple of hours – gone by 10 PM. On cloudy days, like yesterday, they might as well have still been in the box they came in.
Here is a useful site:
http://astro.unl.edu/classaction/animations/coordsmotion/daylighthoursexplorer.html
At my latitude, it tells me there are 15.7 hours of daylight on June 22.
That’s 47° N.
They don’t work for very long here in Florida in the dry season. If they don’t work here I am not sure where they work, but one place you see a lot of them is Vermont, most of the winter they are covered in snow. Only thing I can think of is that the government paid these people to put them in, or they are stupid, or both.
Thanks Jeff. So, after all, people are not nailing solar panels to their roof for ecological reasons and belief in global warming and that all that enormous amount of CO2 is so terribly evil and that unprecedented warming will kill us all. They’re doing it to make lots of money. Took me a while.
Here @ur momisugly 51 N, we have little sunshine from mid-November to mid or late January. What we DO have is pretty close to the horizon (especially on the northern side of a hill round London).
Solar, as a point supply, is useful – some railway signals, teamed with small-scale wind, say.
Not as a baseload; not here – London ; and not in autumn/winter.
Auto
The post has a chart of German origin for a week in August regarding intermittency and non-dispatchability (colors of gray, yellow, blue, +).
Below is a link to electricity produced in a region of the USA and the balancing needed to accommodate the various sources. It is a near real time (updates every 5 minutes) chart. Underneath the chart is an explanation of sources. The “thermal” sources are varied and interesting.
At the time of this writing – mid-morning Friday – the green line for wind is very close to zero. Last week the area filled, from the north, with very cold air that is now stagnant, and we have an air advisory. New weather systems from the west will move this air out in a few days. The wind power will kick in, and the green line will ramp up.
Check back.
http://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/baltwg.aspx
I like how they don’t chart power sent to Cali-land. Wonder now they get paid for it if they cannot show on the chart.
Clicking on the chart around the wind line shows. 4515 MW of installed power in 4/2/13. What does that work out to for capacity factor?
DD,
The BPA does say they are a net exporter. They just don’t give specifics on this page.
Note that one of the lines is direct current. Here are the coordinates of the station just south of the Dalles Dam on the Columbia River.
45.606082, -121.111377
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
Regional History is interesting:
http://columbiariverimages.com/Regions/Places/the_dalles_dam.html
You will find this interesting.
ASME SmartBrief
Hydropower plants pay wind farms to take a break
Hydropower plants face surging water levels as snow melts in springtime — and the best way to get the excess water downstream is to push in through the turbines, generating huge amounts of surplus power. That’s putting hydro-plant operators in the unusual position of having to pay wind-farm operators to suspend their operations, making room for hydro facilities to dump their excess energy into the grid. Jefferson Public Radio (Ashland, Ore.) (11/12)
Like everything involved with climate obsession, the policies and actions pushed by the obsessed are expensive failures.
I am considering the ‘Broken Window Fallacy’ as applicable to highly relative unproductivity of capital investment in solar and wind. It fits.
Hazlitt said generally of the principle central to understanding the broken window fallacy,
John
“Across the board overall solar energy is about ~34 times the cost of comparable standard Gas Fired generation and 9 times less effective. Wind-Power is only ~12 times the comparable cost and about 4 times less effective.”
34 versus only 12 times the costs and 9 times versus 4 times less effective.
Just dump the entire scheme immediately and never discuss it again.
Very interesting analysis thanks. Disappointing that Hydro was left out of all the graphs, as it is fully renewable and cost effective.
I lose interest in analysis that looks at solar averages when the deviations within this sector are huge.
Photovoltaics … such a cute idea … was it hatched in southern California?
Let’s get back to reality … how are things looking in Buffalo?
http://media2.wkbw.com/photo/2014/11/19/IMG_0006_1416448071903_9693560_ver1.0_640_480.JPG
All that snow covering all those roofs … do you have to get up on the rood to shovel off the snow so you can have power?
http://d2ioe7v385j9xr.cloudfront.net/484_0b4b225f-ae2a-4932-b48e-03350424696a/101245c9-0e23-4392-a998-5d5bf613b184.jpg
I don’t know what all these environmentalists are on, but they need to get on back down to earth and get real.
+1 heh.
Get a roof rake if you have snow build up. Takes a while longer but you don’t risk falling.
Of course you could build your house with a nice steep A frame chalet style. Let gravity do the work for you.
A friend bought a solar charger for his electronics before he went on a holiday to Honduras because he was told electricity was intermittent in a lot of places. After getting back he said that was an understatement. He could charge his phone in 2-3 hours down there with his solar charger even when cloudy (yes you could get reception but no electricity, go figure). Back up in Canada where he lives even in summer it is 10 hours or multiple days to do it.
Location, location, location!
Enough snow and even an A frame roof still has snow on it. As for a roof rack for small low roofs ok , but not for a big one. With a roof rake you won’t fall through the roof, but you risk have an avalanche of snow falling on you.
+ 2 Leon. It’s fun watching melting pack-ice snow slide down your neighbour’s solar panels and into their yard. The same yard they’ve just spent 3 hours clearing snow from.
A “trick” previously employed in Germany was to run electricity “backwards” through PV panels under snow until the snow in contact with the panel lubricated the rest to slide off. Glacier calving on a small scale. Only takes about 50kWh per kWp of PV solar.
Apparently; it’s viable if you get paid 4 or 5 times more for in-feed power than what you tap off the grid. Not many get such a good deal nowadays.
When you have that much snow, you clear it off your roof to keep the roof from collapsing. Amazingly as of last report, very few people in Buffalo have lost their power.
Here is a nice reasonable proposal: Take away all so-called subsidies from oil/gas and wind & solar. Also take away the taxes each pay in to taxing authorities. Let’s see which are still standing after 12 months, 18 months and 24 months.
http://sunweber.blogspot.fr/2014/11/prove-this-wrong.htm
Seems to be something wrong with this link
http://sunweber.blogspot.fr/2014_11_01_archive.html
Fixed it for you. Why don’t you try next time?
http://www.agora-energiewende.org/service/recent-electricity-data/
-the data is in English
in the “Overnight Capital Costs compared: $billion/Gigawatt” graph, there is a reference figure of $5.53 billion for “Dual Unit Nuclear”.
the European Commission has approved Britain’s heavily-subsidised Hinkley Point nuclear reactor (in the cause of decarbonisation***); however, altho Bloomberg wrote “Nukes and Shale Win The Day in U.S.-China Climate Deal” on 17 November, the costs for Hinkley are spiralling, & there are continuing project delays:
20 Nov: CarbonBrief: Simon Evans: How the UK’s nuclear new-build plans keep getting delayed
Doubts surfaced again today with the Times reporting a “secret government review” into French firm EDF’s plan to build a new plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset…
The news follows an announcement from EDF that its Flamanville plant in Normandy is facing further delays. The project uses identical designs to the Hinkley scheme.
Flamanville was supposed to take five years to build and begin operating by 2012. Instead it will now take 10 years, and open in 2017. A third identical project at Olkiluoto in Finland is nearly a decade behind schedule.
***New nuclear capacity is a key part of UK government plans for decarbonisation…
Carbon Brief asked EDF when construction of the plant itself will begin and how long it will take to finish. EDF said that level of detail was not yet available…
It isn’t only the finish date that has changed for the UK’s new nuclear plans. The costs have also skyrocketed.
Back in 2008 the white paper on new nuclear in the UKsuggested it would cost £2.8 billion to build a first of its kind 1.6 gigawatt plant, with a range of between £2 and £3.6 billion.
The government later said in 2013 that the the Hinkley C project of two 1.6 gigawatt reactors would cost £16 billion. When the European Commission gave the deal the green light in October it said the project would cost £24 billion…
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/11/how-the-uks-nuclear-new-build-plans-keep-getting-delayed/
12 Nov: Financial Times: Nuclear plants closure bill to reach $100bn
The bill for closing down and cleaning up the world’s ageing nuclear reactors will exceed $100bn over the next 25 years alone, the leading energy watchdog has said, warning that governments risk underestimating the cost.
With almost 200 reactors due to be shut down by 2040, the International Energy Agency says in its annual report there are “considerable uncertainties” about decommissioning costs, reflecting governments’ limited experience in safely dismantling nuclear plants. In the last 40 years, only 10 reactors have been closed down…
But even now, Mr Birol noted, “some 60 years after the first nuclear power plant started operation, no country has yet opened a permanent disposal facility for commercial high-level waste”.
Paul Dorfman of the Energy Institute at University College London noted that the IEA’s $100bn figure is only for decommissioning and does not include the costs of permanent waste disposal.
“The UK’s own decommissioning and waste disposal costs are £85bn alone, so that gives you an idea of the astronomical costs associated with nuclear,” he said…
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/925030a2-68fb-11e4-9eeb-00144feabdc0.html
end the war on coal & there wouldn’t be such a panic over energy in general.