Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Forbes, plunging renewable costs is a profitable opportunity for the Federal Government to finance renewable energy at no additional cost to consumers, but they should make sure the market treats renewable energy “fairly”.
Plunging Renewable Energy Prices Mean U.S. Can Hit 90% Clean Electricity By 2035 – At No Extra Cost
Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology
We are a nonpartisan climate policy think tank helping policymakers make informed energy policy choices and accelerate clean energy by supporting the policies that most effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Silvio Marcacci Communications Director
Renewable energy has historically been considered too expensive and too unreliable to power our grid, but new research has overturned that trope for good. Plummeting wind, solar, and storage prices have fallen so fast that the United States can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 – without raising customer costs at all from today’s levels, and actually decreasing wholesale power costs 10%.
Building a 90% clean electricity system by 2035 would catalyze massive economic growth that helps pull the U.S. out of the COVID-19 recession by supporting more than a half million new net jobs per year, injecting $1.7 trillion into the economy, and recharging domestic manufacturing. Technology-neutral policies can reach a 90% clean power system, help energy developers and investors prosper, and pave the way for technologies of the future.
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Fast-falling renewable and energy storage costs have changed this outlook – clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels, and actual costs in 2018-2019 were lower than previously projected costs for 2030-2035. Research has shown that by 2025 86% of the U.S. coal fleet will cost more to run than replacing it with local wind and solar generation, and clean energy portfolios of renewables and storage are cheaper than new natural gas generation.
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The 2035 report was accompanied by technology-neutral policy recommendations for Congress, federal department and national labs, governors and state legislatures, and electricity market regulators to help reach a 90% clean electricity future:
- Congress should adopt a federal clean electricity standard reaching 55% by 2025, 75% by 2030, 90% by 2035, and 100% by 2045; states should adopt clean energy standards of 90% by 2035 or earlier and 100% by 2045 (or earlier).
- Congress should extend existing federal clean energy investment and production tax credits, making energy storage eligible, and convert credits to more liquid incentives.
- Federal and state policymakers should help refinance bad coal debt to reduce the costs of a coal-to-clean transition, and support coal-dependent communities by shoring up pension and healthcare services while funding worker retraining for the clean energy economy.
- Congress and federal officials should streamline renewable energy and transmission siting and regional planning, while reducing interconnection costs.
- Federal and state policymakers should invest in R&D policies to develop the future technologies needed to reach 100% clean electricity.
- Federal and state policymakers should reform wholesale markets and utility business models to fairly value clean energy and support investment in a least-cost, technology-neutral portfolio of energy resources.
If renewable energy is such a winner, if “clean energy is now cheaper than fossil fuels”, why don’t renewable energy entrepreneurs get private bank finance like everyone else, and simply drive the competition out of business with their superior technology?
Why do they need reform of wholesale markets, and federal clean energy standards to drive progress?
“We are a nonpartisan climate policy think tank”
Uh huh. “Oh, I almost forgot – when will I start getting the payoff from that bridge you sold me?”
“Plunging renewable energy costs” should be answered with massive ROTFLs, hoots, guffaws, and weapons-grade mockery.
According to Simon, if you mock something, that proves you are actually afraid of it.
Leftists always have to lie to sell their crap.
This is another transparent lie. Does Forbes actually have readers who know nothing about markets and pricing…and the need for subsidies.
Not in the last few decades.
Forbes should fund the renewable energies, without the citizens funding Forbes. See the problem there?
Exactly! If, as Forbes asserts, “plunging renewable costs is a profitable opportunity” then why restrict this opportunity to the Federal government? Shouldn’t Forbes be encouraging all public corporations (even privates ones) to rush to get on board to reap the profits?
And when is the last time anyone bought into a phrase such as “Plummeting wind, solar, and storage prices have fallen so fast that the United States can reach 90% clean electricity by 2035 – without raising customer costs at all from today’s levels, and actually decreasing wholesale power costs 10%.”?
My gas utility costs and my electricity utility costs, on a prorated basis, have gone up significantly in the last year. There is no evidence whatsoever they will decrease before I die.
Is Forbes breaking the news that the US Government doesn’t need money from taxes any more?
This is why PG&E is going to use distributed diesel fueled power generators to keep from having rolling black outs like California had last Fall. I suspect the data this author is relying are pretty suspect. I looked into a portable solar power -battery system for backing up my home’s refrigerator just a month ago; and the battery system takes 13 hours to recharge and the battery is empty within an hour or less. The same wattage gasoline generator can power my refrigerator for 5 to 6 hours on one gallon of gasoline. Forbes use to be very business and practical oriented but it must have been co-opted in recent years by the Green subsidy seeking corporate cronies.
If their costs are plummeting, why do they need subsidies?
It’s just just another scam. Let them sink or swim in a free market.
Has anyone carefully read through the entire Forbes article?
How about some (all?) of the links within that article?
Do you all realize that the author of the Forbes piece – Silvio Marcacci – is the communication director for that ultra Renewable booster outfit Energy Innovation?
Do you all realize that this piece is nothing more than a chest thumping press release?
Kinda like the late night infomercials touting “But wait! There’s more!”
As this entire facade of Globull Warming comes crashing down …
As the overwhelming, irrefutable indications of the imminent Grand Solar Minimum continue to emerge all around us, what we are witnessing is the absolutely frenzied, desperate attempts to maintain viable what will come to be recognized as the most bizarre, widespread, damaging incidence of hysteria in all of human history.
“the most bizarre, widespread, damaging incidence of hysteria in all of human history.”
Apart from Progressivism.
Just like NPR, per the late Charles Krauthammer, if it’s so great, why does it need to be on the national tit?
Fossil fuel companies pay royalties to government(s) for the rights to extract resources owned by the governments, for oversight of environmental, employment and other regulatory regimes and for the regulatory oversight of setting up companies and regulating them. Some of these ‘rights’ are just assumed by renewable power companies without contributing towards the governments costs. Isn’t it time someone came up with a concept whereby renewables paid ‘royalties’ for the rights to the sun and wind that although not owned by anyone, are present in a government controlled space and necessitate costs to government?
I invite everyone to look at the actual production of energy from wind here in the UK over the past three days. Look at the production today and at various times over the past months. It is as close to zero as it is possible to be, yet this is the windiest part of Europe according to studies and represents the ideal location for wind farms on and offshore!!
It is producing zero right now 7.30 am UK and this is the European ideal location at a time when people would be ramping up work energy demand.
Go to https://gridwatch.co.uk/ for details.
It is not possible to run businesses on intermittent energy supply, no matter what subsidised invented low price they project. The true cost of unreliability is failure, end of story..
Denmark is the same with many more windmills per capita. Over the last month they have on average imported ~25% of of their electricity, mostly from Norwegian hydro.
https://carl-fh.com/climate
Right now Denmark imports 56% and current Capacity Factor for wind is a few percent.
So Denmark needs about ten times more windmills in case the Atlantic connection to Norway breaks, or they need to shuffle more coal into their conventional power stations.
I suggest Denmark just sells wind turbines to UK, US, etc. and stops growing them on home ground.
Methinks the writer of the Forbes piece lives in CloudCuckooLand.
Not just lives there, he’s their ambassador.
The whole thing corresponds exactly to what the former French President Hollande was once supposed to have said: it doesn’t cost anything, it’s paid by the state!
All things are cheap when someone else picks up the tab.
It would be a bit of an issue in the UK today 16 June. Wind 0.12GW (0.37%) Solar 3.60GW (11.05%) on the other hand much maligned (but reliable and predictable) fossil fuels CCGT 20.73GW (63.61%). We’re still burning American trees Biomass 2.34GW (7.18%). Demand not particularly high today Demand 32.59GW.
Data https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
Interesting is the link in the text with the word “new research”: it’s a link to a website run by a green think tank of the University of California Berkeley, the Goldman School of public policy. The keywords mentioned are there, but no research results are to be found. Same thing for the “Plumetting prices”: a link to an article published by a so-called “nonpartisan! climate policy think tank”. So much for referencing: just links to people with the same point of view (or the same degree of fanatism).
I really appreciate Pat Frank’s contribution: that data speaks for itself.
No actual data, just models.
Sounds familiar.
It has been commented on, but the way they are trying to classify tax deductibles as a subsidy is shameless. Imagine looking at the profit & loss account: top line turnover; then expenses; staff costs, materials etc. Bottom line is something called profit. You pay the tax on the profit. Profit is only a couple of percent of turnover. Imagine coming along and crossing through all the expenses: no, you can’t deduct staff costs; no,you can’t deduct fuel burned; no, you can’t deduct premise costs. Is that what these people are saying? They are crazy.
In the mind of a progressive, everything belongs to the government.
When the government permits you to keep some of what you have earned, that’s a subsidy.
Home, home on the strange,
where the greens and the enviros play,
where never is heard, that the stuff just won’t work,
and the skies are not cloudy at all…
I took a look at the market value of generation and interconnector imports for GB in March, using half hour settlement period data and System Sell/Buy Prices from BM Reports for balancing at gate closure.
Here are the results:
CCGT £36.02/MWh
COAL £45.80/MWh
BIOMASS £30.96/MWh
NUCLEAR £29.46/MWh
WIND £25.70/MWh
Pumped Storage £67.41/MWh
Hydro £32.28/MWh
OCGT £203.78/MWh
OTHER £32.84/MWh
INT France £31.08/MWh
INT Britned £31.88/MWh
INT Belgium £31.14/MWh
INT Moyle £25.26/MWh
INT Ireland £24.11/MWh
So the market value of coal output was higher than for everything else except for peak lopping Open Cycle Gas Turbines. The Moyle and Ireland E-W interconnector imports are of course surplus wind from Ireland, which is why they have similar low values to the wind itself.
For completeness, the values on exported energy and cost of pumping for storage were:
Pumped Storage £17.76/MWh
INT France £16.05/MWh
INT Britned £14.05/MWh
INT Belgium £16.32/MWh
INT Moyle £37.67/MWh
INT Ireland £44.21/MWh
Ireland was paying for shortages of wind, meanwhile we exported at giveaway prices to the Continent when we had a surplus.
Now compare with the £162.47/MWh guaranteed to Hornsea offshore wind farm, or the renewables obligation subsidies worth a minimum of £50/MWh for onshore wind.
This is brought to you by another Two-Dimensional Linear Extrapolation Think Tank and is justified with much hand waving.
“Plunging Renewable Energy Prices Mean U.S. Can Hit 90% Clean Electricity By 2035 – At No Extra Cost”
Has anyone figured out how we’re going to build enough wind mills and solar panels to supply 90% of the power in the US in just 15 years?
No
Forbes is drinking the Kool-Aid.
And, they want everybody else to drink the Kool-Aid.
Forbes, a hack magazine that parrots the globalist narrative.
Don’t buy it.
That plunging cost is due to labor savings in automated plants and utility scale projects, R&D investment, and massive capacity expansion with more investments. That is not a reason for federal stimulus of labor-intensive, high-cost rooftop solar lobbyists and their ad placements at Forbes and Bloomberg!
Forbes has really gone downhill the past several years.
This is the sort of nonsense you hear from clean energy pimps. First of plunging costs means nothing if the costs are still way high. And if they are so low, as the phrase is supposed to intimate, hey just wait they will become cheaper than the alternative.
Half a million net jobs adding 1.7 trillion, seemed a little off, given the US labor market is 160 million or so and produces something like 22 Trillion every year. If we keep per capital average the same that would be 544 Trillion by 160 million workers. So of course a large time frame must be involved.
Where is the fake news alert.