From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
The International Renewable Energy Agency, IRENA, makes no secret that its only objective is to promote renewable energy. It is an intergovernmental organization, with 169 member countries plus the EU.
One of its main tools is to convince governments and public that renewable energy is much cheaper than fossil fuels. They have produced this dashboard for onshore wind costs:
The UK costs are said to be $0.0314/kWh, which equates to about £25.12/MWh. Yet the clearing price for onshore wind at this year’s CfD auction was £50.90/MWh at 2012 prices, which uplifts to £69.91 at 2023 prices:
Clearly IRENA’s costs are not only fake, they are fraudulent. If the UK’s costings are wrong, no doubt every other country’s is as well.
In any event LCOEs, that is levelised costs, are meaningless, as they don’t include all of the indirect costs associated with intermittency.
It is worth noting that the BEIS levelised costings published last year, also an unrealistically low cost for onshore wind, though not quite as fanciful as IRENA’s.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-generation-costs-2023
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So do countries with the most wind energy have the highest or lowest overall electricity prices? I understand that highest is the answer.
The more windmills there are on a grid, the more expensive the electricity, along with a reduction in reliability of the grid which may lead to blackouts.
Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how many of those 169 countries are those that would receive Hazard Grift Payments from the Paris slush fund that the US, EU and Developed Nations are supposed to fund thanks th the 2015 Paris Accords?
I guess it would be 169!
remember that an audit of the US welfare some while ago found that 80 some % of funds were expended in administrative costs, leaving a much smaller % that actually reached people who might need the help. The same is true for many charities and cor NGOs that disperse “aid”. Why expect UN controlled funds to be any different?
I think Non-government Organizations are getting completely out of hand.
They are undermining the laws in the case of illegal immigration. They have too much power and are getting too much taxpayer money.
A large Congresional investigation is called for.
Tom,
Do you have data to back up your statement that, “the more windmills there are on a grid, the more expensive the electricity, …”
Here is a link from wuwt which shows that the more renewable energy there is on an electricity grid, the higher the cost of electricity.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/02/20/wind-solar-and-household-electricity-prices/
Thanks for the help, Bill.
Every instance where I see windmills being added to a grid results in higher electricity prices and at a certain point the grid operators start issuing warnings about brownouts and blackouts.
The U.S. grid never had any major problems up until now, but since the addition of significant numbers of windmills, and retirement of coal plants, every grid in the United States has issued warnings about possible coming blackouts.
My particular power grid, the Southwest Power Pool (SPP), issued a warning this summer about potential power failures as the temperatures were expected to reach 102F. They didn’t quite get that high this time around.
If 102F will trigger a blackout on my grid, then I would say we are in BIG trouble, because 102F is not a very high temperature around this part of the country in summer (Oklahoma/central US). We regularly see temperatures that high and higher, a lot higher, and the high temperaures last sometimes for weeks at a time.
If our grid is in trouble around 102F, over a couple of days, then I better get myself a home generator because it’s going to be hotter than that, for longer, guaranteed.
Yeah, the addition of windmills to U.S. power grids has put the entire United States electrical system in jeopardy. Our fate now depends on the weather not being too bad.
Self-inflicted. Stupid. CO2-phobes are ruining the place.
IRENA is part of the wind lobby. They are paid liars, like everybody involved in the wind industry.
Well said and true. 🙂
Quite ironic that they are based in Abu Dhabi UAE 🙂
The UK is fast becoming a basket case. On every front. We recently had a dunkelflaute and came close to lights out. There is an answer to that, apparently
UK’s neglect of tidal power was all too clear amid 10 days of gloomPlentiful but untapped source of renewable energy could have helped fill shortfall during record cloud cover
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/nov/22/weatherwatch-uk-neglect-of-tidal-power-was-clear-amid-10-days-of-gloom
Bonkers.
Did I read that right – plug ONE gaping hole in renewable power source with ANOTHER tech that also has a ‘gaping hole’?
You did.
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the
Albert Hallseats in Parliament….Windmills have made inroads into all United States electrical grids and as a result, all electrical grids in the United States are now in danger of brownouts and blackouts.
This wasn’t the case before the introduction of windmills.
Last I saw at EIA, Utah had only two large-scale wind projects, and both sell their product to California.
The UK has been on a downward slide since WW one.
It will never recover, especially after it became flooded with prolific illegal aliens
It is a total basket case, worse than Germany and France.
Yes, the UK is a basket-case, but ‘never’ is a long time. All it needs for a speedy recovery is a re-vamped energy system and a government that gets off people’s backs. Liz Truss’s policies would have worked but she didn’t have enough spine to resist the forces of evil in her own party. Politically speaking, Britain now depends on Nigel Farage and Kemi Badenoch, but the reality is that there’s probably not much they can do without a popular revolt. Bring it on, Britain needs one.
The UK would need:
a lobotomy,
get rid of its useless royalty and title hierarchy, which would save $billions, and
get rid of its highly subsidized, environmentally damaging, dysfunctional wind and solar, and
stop importing fast-breeding rabble from all over the world, and
get rid of its useless military, and
invest in invest in advanced STEM industries.
There have been proposals about tidal schemes in the UK since the 1920s (first Severn Barrage proposal). Further proposals for the Severn were made in 1933, 1944, and several in the 1960s and 70s. Another proposal in 1981 eventually reached a projected cost of £10 billion before it was ditched.
Imagine the cost of that proposal in today’s money!
The Grauniad lives in its own little world.
.
Today’s quizz –
“Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” is the definition of –
The Democrat Philosophy!
Insanity, of course, is the correct answer, but all of the others are somehow better.
“The UK costs are said to be $0.0314/kWh, which equates to about £25.12/MWh. Yet the clearing price for onshore wind at this year’s CfD auction was £50.90/MWh at 2012 prices, which uplifts to £69.91 at 2023 prices:”
You cannot equate LCOE with CfD strike price. No-one goes into business with a price ceiling which is just the cost price. There is an expectation of profit. Plus a CfD incorporates a risk calculation which is not present in LCOE. DESNZ explains this here
Renewable energy – with available tech – is a deluded pipe dream
Offshore wind is over £250 / Mwh
Gas, even with the distorted market, is ~£65
The same fallacy – CfD for wind vs LCOE for gas.
No, real costs that we are paying. Wake up day dreamer
You pay just one price for electricity. Where did you get your 250 and 65?
Are you all there, Nick?
What do you think the green subsidies pay for? Faerie dust? It might as well.
UK electricity is FOUR times more expensive than gas despite all the supposed ‘cheap’ unreliables.
That’s because Ruinables aren’t cheap
They’re mineral intensive, land extensive, low density, part time fuelish subsidy farms
The levelized cost of anything is only true for things which can be provided on demand to a consumer provided the claimed “levelized cost” includes all costs in getting a product to consumers. Gas is supplied continually, except for rare local casualties, so a LCOE for it is rational provided the LCOE includes production, delivery, metering and taxes at the point of delivery, i.e. all costs. The same can be said of couches and cars. By itself, the LCOE of wind energy at the windmill does not include all the costs involved in getting it to the consumer such as conversion of DC to AC, grid stabilization, delivery costs (wiring, transformers and such), back up costs because wind energy is not produced continuously and and at times is zero and of course, Government subsidies. But then you certainly know all of this don’t you Nick.
Yes the “pea and thimble” games that go on with cost assessments of “renewables” are worthy of a sideshow alley conjurer.
Or should I say not worthy of a sideshow alley conjurer.
The ONLY determinant (“data” as it actually is) is the stated amount to be paid at the bottom of electricity bills.
And the real impact question is –
“were your electricity bills lower or higher before ‘renewable’ generated sources of electricity were added to the supply?”
LCOEs (Levelised costs of electricity) are only meaningful for dispatchable facilities. When they give cost per unit of electricity for a given source, there is an implicit assumption that when one unit is down another unit of the same type can be working to cover the gap. A coal fired power station down for maintenance, for example, can be covered by another coal fired power station. So if coal fired power has an x% capacity factor (ie, it delivers on average x% of nominal capacity), it is reasonable to base its LCOE on that x%, ie, (cost per unit capacity)*100/x. A wind farm experiencing a lack of wind cannot be covered by another wind farm because that second wind farm will also have a lack of wind. It is therefore nonsense to quote LCOE the same way for wind farms. That gap between x% and 100% cannot be supplied by wind; an entirely different equation is needed. Same for solar.
Even the US EIA says you can’t use LCOE to make valid comparisons across different forms of energy
You can, Levelized is the L in LCOE.
But Paul’s failure is in comparing LCOE for wind with CfD for wind.
Your complete FAILURE is your ignorance of the totally UNRELIABILITY of wind and solar.
These terms are irrelevant when there is no wind blowing.
Nick, realistically and honestly, the only way to compare the “as delivered / point of consumption” costs of reliable power generation and intermittent power generation is to add in ALL the indispensable standby / back-up / switch-over costs of the gas and coal plants commandeered because wind & solar can’t produce reliably, continuously.
Diesel-fueled generators such as South Australia and Victoria have to use to take over from wind & solar must also be included in the “Levelized” costs comparisons too.
And not just the costs attributable to the sessions that fossils have to step up for when w&s have left the building, these costs have to FULLY ascribed to the costs of inflicting W&S on the grids in the first place, because w&s ARE NOT VIABLE WITHOUT GAS / COAL / NUCLEAR.
I explain in an earlier comment in this thread why LCOE is meaningless for wind and solar.
Nick:
Not so. EIA says you can’t really compare dispatchable to intermittant energy sources (wind & solar), and the higher intermittant source % the less valuable they are to the grid. I am not commenting on CfDs.
[ ] = my notes
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/electricity_generation.php
“Because load must be continuously balanced, generating units with the capability to vary output to follow demand (dispatchable technologies) generally have more value to a system than less flexible units that use intermittent resources to operate (resource-constrained technologies [ie, wind & solar]). We list the LCOE values for dispatchable and resource-constrained technologies separately because they require a careful comparison.” [ie, they are scared to state the obviuos: Not comparable]
and
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy20osti/74598.pdf
[cost of wind by a an advocacy group; does NOT include transmission or back-up in its LCOE calculation]
Nick,
the fifth auction round produced no takers and the government had to raise CfD prices before it attracted any bidders.
AR6 gave a CfD of £89 for onshore and if the government’s own figures (from the article) is well under half that, even with inflation, wouldn’t you say that is an extortionate profit for a supplier who has a guaranteed market?
Professor Gordon Hughes’s research using wind farms published accounts give a much higher actual capital and operating costs picture.
” LCOE and LCOS by themselves do not capture all of the factors that contribute to investment decisions, making direct comparisons of LCOE and LCOS across technologies problematic and misleading as a method to assess competitiveness of various generation alternatives.”
EIA ‘Levelised Costs of New Generation Resources’ in the Annual Energy Outlook 2022 (March 2022)
You say there is risk in wind? I am amazed. 🙂
There is risk in everything. You won’t get a gas generator to agree to a CfD at the LCOE price.
The main risk is that you have agreed to a price fixed over a long period by formula when your costs may rise. Another is that the agreed price may after time be well below market.
And the risk when you install wind turbines is that for large amounts of the time you get little to no electricity.
Actually, not a “risk”.. more a feature. But the grid still has to pay for it.!
“Agreed price” only has meaning if it is aligned with agreed supply. !
Wind cannot do that.
Tell us Nick,
What if you paid for a round bail of hay to be delivered…. but it never arrived.
You ring up the seller and he says,
“sorry we didn’t have any left, but you have to pay for it anyway”.
Would you want to buy from that same person again ??
Which only stands to Prove
Wind and Solar are NOT CHEAP
Yesterday I did a very pleasant walk in the sunshine along the dunes and promenades of the Sefton coast, north of Liverpool, UK. There is a large wind turbine farm offshore spoiling the views. None of the 60 odd contraptions was moving, none. All at a standstill, doing nothing. Somewhere a gas-fired or nuclear power plant must have been doing overtime.
Nah, just left to carry on doing their usual jobs, coal, gas and nuclear fueled power plants will produce their output capacities 24×7 no matter what the weather throws at them.
“Overtime” is a concept that has no applicability to PROPER electricity generation,
You obviously never saw Christmas Vacation.
Humor – a difficult concept.
— Lt. Saavik
Even if they are turning they could actually be consuming to ensure the gearboxes do not seize. The clue when this is happening is they are pointed in different directions and some will not be turning at all.
IRENA energy costs are grossly tainted by wokeness idiocy
It is best to totally ignore IRINA
Cost of product £25, CFD guaranteed income £70. Mmmmmmmm, what’s not to like?
LCOE, levelized cost of energy (electricity), is a metric designed by Lazard to discount (pay back quickly with maximum profit) risk-free ‘loans’ guaranteed by governments. The LCOE metric values an energy system for as little as 10 years, consistent with intermittent renewable energy systems’ short life spans.
LCOE places ZERO value on the long lived energy returns from coal or nuclear nuclear plants. Therefore, the LCOE metrics encourages continuous ‘loans’ and continuous profits for the bankers at the tax payers’ expense without regard to actual value.
This metric has much in common with the goals of the Federal Reserve System: to control the money supply, lending to governments fiat money at a high interest rate.
Guess who benefits?
In today’s warped energy marketplace, the systemic costs of wind & solar intermittency are shifted on to wind & solar’s competion — coal, gas, and nuclear.
And so if you are selling wind and solar, your competition is paying for your own systemic cost management issues, which get larger and larger as your penetration of the marketplace increases.
Such a deal!
Lying is not okay, what part of that do they not understand.
US/UK 66,000 MW OF OFFSHORE WIND BY 2030; AN EXPENSIVE FANTASY
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/biden-30-000-mw-of-off…
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US Offshore Wind Electricity Production and Cost
Electricity production about 30,000 MW x 8766 h/y x 0.40, lifetime capacity factor = 105,192,000 MWh, or 105.2 TWh. The production would be about 100 x 105.2/4000 = 2.63% of the annual electricity loaded onto US grids.
Electricity Cost, c/kWh: Assume a $550 million, 100 MW project consists of foundations, wind turbines, cabling to shore, and installation, at $5,500/kW.
Production 100 MW x 8766 h/y x 0.40, CF = 350,640,000 kWh/y
Amortize bank loan for $385 million, 70% of project, at 6.5%/y for 20 y, 9.824 c/kWh.
Owner return on $165 million, 30% of project, at 10%/y for 20 y, 5.449 c/kWh
Offshore O&M, about 30 miles out to sea, 8 c/kWh.
Supply chain, special ships, ocean transport, 3 c/kWh
All other items, 4 c/kWh
Total cost 9.824 + 5.449 + 8 + 3 + 4 = 30.273 c/kWh
Less 50% subsidies (ITC, 5-y depreciation, interest deduction on borrowed funds) 15.137 c/kWh
Owner sells to utility at 15.137 c/kWh; developers in NY state, etc., want much more. See Above.
.
High Costs/kWh of Offshore Wind
Forcing utilities to pay 15 c/kWh, wholesale, after 50% subsidies, for electricity from fixed offshore wind systems, and forcing utilities to pay 18 c/kWh, wholesale, after 50% subsidies, for electricity from floating offshore wind systems, is suicidal economic insanity.
.
Excluded costs, at a future 30% wind/solar penetration on the grid, the current UK level:
.
1) Grid extension/reinforcement to connect remote W/S systems to load centers, about 2 c/kWh
2) A fleet of quick-reacting power plants to counteract the variable W/S output, on a less-than-minute-by-minute basis, 24/7/365, about 2 c/kWh
3) A fleet of power plants to provide electricity during low-W/S periods, and during high-W/S periods, when rotors are feathered and locked, to provide the electricity not produced by W/S systems, to meet demand, about 2 c/kWh.
4) Output curtailments to prevent overloading the grid, i.e., paying owners for not producing what they could have produced, about 1 c/kWh
5) Disassembly at sea, reprocessing and storing at hazardous waste sites, about 2 c/kWh
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/hunga-tonga-volcanic-eruption
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/natural-forces-cause-periodic-global-warming
Levelized Cost of Energy Deceptions, by US-EIA, et al.
Most people have no idea wind and solar systems need grid expansion/reinforcement and expensive support systems to even exist on the grid.
.
With increased annual W/S electricity percent on the grid, increased grid investments are needed, plus greater counteracting plant capacity, MW, especially when it is windy and sunny around noon-time.
Increased counteracting of the variable W/S output, places an increased burden on the grid’s other generators, causing them to operate in an inefficient manner (more Btu/kWh, more CO2/kWh), which adds more cost/kWh to the offshore wind electricity cost of about 15 c/kWh, after 50% subsidies
.
The various cost/kWh adders start with annual W/S electricity at about 8% on the grid.
The adders become exponentially greater, with increased annual W/S electricity percent on the grid
.
The US-EIA, Lazard, Bloomberg, etc., and their phony LCOE “analyses”, are deliberately understating the cost of wind, solar and battery systems
Their LCOE “analyses” of W/S/B systems purposely exclude major LCOE items.
Their deceptions reinforced the popular delusion, W/S are competitive with fossil fuels, which is far from reality.
The excluded LCOE items are shifted to taxpayers, ratepayers, and added to government debts.
.
High Costs/kWh of Offshore Wind
Forcing utilities to pay 15 c/kWh, wholesale, after 50% subsidies, for electricity from fixed offshore wind systems, and forcing utilities to pay 18 c/kWh, wholesale, after 50% subsidies, for electricity from floating offshore wind systems, is suicidal economic insanity.
.
Excluded costs, at a future 30% wind/solar penetration on the grid, the current UK level:
.
1) Grid extension/reinforcement to connect remote W/S systems to load centers, about 2 c/kWh
2) A fleet of quick-reacting power plants to counteract the variable W/S output, on a less-than-minute-by-minute basis, 24/7/365, about 2 c/kWh
3) A fleet of power plants to provide electricity during low-W/S periods, and during high-W/S periods, when rotors are feathered and locked, to provide the electricity not produced by W/S systems, to meet demand, about 2 c/kWh.
4) Output curtailments to prevent overloading the grid, i.e., paying owners for not producing what they could have produced, about 1 c/kWh
5) Disassembly at sea, reprocessing and storing at hazardous waste sites, about 2 c/kWh
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/hunga-tonga-volcanic-eruption
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/natural-forces-cause-periodic-global-warming