By Bill Peacock
“The data make it clear that the only possible rationale for renewable energy—making significant reductions of CO2 emissions—cannot be achieved. The costs of attempting to do this are already imposing heavy costs on economies across the world.”
By the 1800s, wind and solar were both mature and successful technologies. Yet as soon as Western society developed the wealth and technology to take advantage of fossil fuels, they were discarded—along with batteries for electric cars—with no place in the modern world for grid-scale generation of electricity.
Renewable energy still cannot compete with the efficiency, affordability, and reliability of fossil fuels. But this has not stopped it from making a comeback on the backs of American taxpayers and consumers who have paid for hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies from federal, state, and local governments.
Renewables need these subsidies because the cost of generating electricity from wind and solar plants—and the cost of storing it in batteries—greatly exceeds the cost of generating electricity from natural gas. In a real-world setting, wind generation costs three times that of natural gas, and solar generation and battery storage are four times greater.
Squandered Resources
Billions of taxpayer money are also being spent on trying to maintain grid reliability as renewable penetration increases on the grid. From 2019 through 2023, Texas spent on average about $9.6 billion a year, for a total cost of $48.4 billion, attempting to deal with the reliability problems caused by renewables.
One study found the cost of electrification/Net Zero policies in the Pacific Northwest would increase the bill of the average residential customer in Oregon and Washington by $600 a month by 2050. In New England, another study found the cost of meeting the region’s decarbonization goals with renewables is estimated to cost ratepayers $815 billion through 2050.
These and other studies make it clear that the only possible rationale for renewable energy—making significant reductions of CO2 emissions—cannot be achieved. The costs of attempting to do this with renewables are already imposing heavy costs on economies across the world–and will rapidly escalate as the grid penetration of renewables increases. As several European countries have already experienced as they plunged into energy poverty, the costs are simply too great for any society to pay.
The Failed War Against Fossil Fuels
Over the past 30 years, the American electric grid has undergone a radical transformation powered by hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies from federal, state, and local governments. Prior to this, despite the examples of California and New York, the national grid generally provided a relatively affordable and reliable supply of electricity to American businesses and consumers. Today, prices are skyrocketing and reliability problems have greatly increased in frequency and Texas’ successful push to embrace renewable energy has caused it to overtake California and New York as the state with the least reliable grid.
All of this has happened because of the ongoing war against fossil fuels. Beginning in the 1960s, special interests assaulted the cheapest, most efficient, and most reliable energy source the world has ever had on multiple fronts. Acid rain, peak oil, ozone layer depletion, global cooling, global warming, the Russia/Ukraine war, and other false narratives have been used in the effort to eliminate fossil fuels. While they have all failed in that regard, what they have accomplished is to impose third-world style energy poverty on much of the developed Western world as energy prices—particularly for electricity—have increased.
False Energies
Many alternative energy sources to fossil fuels have been proposed along the way.
These include algae, saltwater, landfill gas, cold fusion, biodiesel, ethanol, ocean waves, and hydrogen. All these have failed. Another proposed alternative, synthetic fuels, also failed despite being supported by President Jimmy Carter and Congress with close to $1 billion in funding.
Nuclear energy has shown commercial promise as an alternative but has largely been shut down by governments even though the process emits no CO2. Today the darling of the anti-fossil fuel crowd is wind and solar power, along with the batteries needed to store their intermittent and often unneeded generation of electricity for those times when the electricity is needed but wind and/or solar are not generating.
The hallmark of renewable energy sources in the ancient world—wind-, solar-, and hydro-power—was that they were dependent on the weather. They were all humankind had, along with animal power, for several millennia because the capital and technology needed to build the infrastructure to support fossil fuels were insufficient. It stayed that way until the 1800s, when wealth had expanded throughout the Western world to the point where coal, oil, and natural gas became economically viable.
As Robert Bryce explains, “By using hydrocarbons (at first coal, then later oil and natural gas) humans were able to harness ever increasing quantities of power and do so in ever-denser packages. In place of animal power, sun power, and wind power, factories began using advanced waterwheels and coal-fired steam engines.” By 1900, wind and solar were both mature and very uneconomical technologies that had been discarded—along with batteries for electric cars—and had no rational place in the modern world for grid scale generation of electricity. They still do not.
Government Mandates, Subsidies Created the Renewable ‘Renaissance’
A hundred years later, wind and solar energy have made a comeback, exceeding the success of other promoted alternatives to fossil fuels. But not because they are more efficient, economical, or reliable than fossil fuels. The law of power density explains why fossil fuels produce more units of energy per input unit of land (minerals and metals) than renewables and can generally be used, or dispatched—unlike renewables—on demand. The only reason the American landscape is littered with wind turbines and solar panels is because of government intervention through mandates and subsidies.
Early in the “energy transition,” renewable energy mandates required retail electric providers to purchase certain amounts of their electricity from renewable sources or, in lieu of that, purchase renewable energy credits from wind and solar generators. In essence, renewable generators were paid twice for their electricity; once for the power and once for the credits.
Subsidies have also been important in increasing renewable energy use and profits. Figure 1 (below) shows their impact with subsidies for wind and particular solar rapidly increasing since Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act. Federal subsidies for renewables this decade are more than four times what they were in the last decade, and solar subsidies have increased even more. Many state and local governments have followed suit and are also using subsidies to force the energy transition on Americans.
| Figure 1: U.S. Federal Energy Subsidies | |||
| Subsidy | 2010-19 | 2020-2029 | Total |
| Renewables | $74,069,797,000 | $244,874,000,000 | $318,943,797,000 |
| Fossil Fuels | $37,870,000,000 | $22,474,000,000 | $60,344,000,000 |
| Nuclear | $15,410,000,000 | $19,116,000,000 | $34,526,000,000 |
| Source: Bennett, et al; U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation 2019 & 2023; U.S. EIA; Congressional Budget Office | |||
The roles that mandates and subsidies play vary depending on the state. Texas—the state that generates the most electricity from renewables—relies more on subsidies to promote renewables having changed its mandate for wind credits into a voluntary program in 2024—though its solar program is still mandatory (Texas also eliminated one local subsidy in 2023).
However, states like Oregon and Washington are using Net Zero mandates to push the transition to renewables beyond what the subsidies might sustain (see more below). They are doing this because the costs of transitioning to anywhere near 100% renewable are so large the public would likely rebel against subsidies of that amount. So, the states, along with the federal government, are trying to hide the costs by forcing consumers and business to pay for the transition through higher electricity bills.
High Capital and Operating Costs of Renewables
The necessity of resorting to renewable mandates and subsidies to force an energy transition onto Americans was reinforced last year by data on the cost of generating electricity from a variety of sources. The data, compiled and released by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), shows that generating electricity from wind and solar and the costs of batter storage are still far more expensive than generation from natural gas, the source of the most generation in the United States. Figure 2 summarizes the EIA’s findings.
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration
According to the EIA, the cost of building a new combined-cycle natural gas generating unit is $868 per kilowatt of maximum capacity. Wind and solar generation costs for a new plant are almost twice as much, and the cost of battery storage is more than double. But these numbers don’t tell the full story because natural gas plants can generate electricity much closer to their maximum capacity than can wind and solar plants. Because batteries do not generate electricity, but store it, they run out and thus are also not capable of producing electricity at the same output as natural gas.
Taking this into account, Figure 2 shows the cost of natural gas combined-cycle generation at its average operating capacity factor of 59.7% is $1,453 per kilowatt. For onshore wind at its capacity factor of 33.2%, the cost is $4,485 per kilowatt—three times that of natural gas. Solar, at its capacity factor of 23.2%, costs $6,476 per kilowatt—more than four times natural gas. And the cost of batteries, with a capacity factor of 25%, is $6,976—again more than four times natural gas. Even coal—with all the costly regulations generators must pay for, is almost competitive with wind and less expensive than solar or batteries.
These costs only account for the cost of building new generation. But there are also fixed costs such as interest and maintenance to be considered. Again, taking into account the capacity factors of each type of generation, natural gas (combined cycle) comes in much cheaper than renewables with a fixed cost of $12.12 per kilowatt annually, compared to $33.06 for onshore wind, $20.23 for solar, and $40 for battery storage.
The ‘No Fuel Cost’ Myth of Renewables
One of the myths about wind and solar generation is that it has an advantage over fossil fuels because it has no fuel costs. For instance, the International Renewable Energy Agency claims, “The fossil fuel price crisis has accelerated the competitiveness of renewable power.” And in a recent article, The Problem with Solar, the authors wrote a benefit of solar is that “it’s basically free” when the sun is shining.
Yet, as we have seen, this is not the case. The costs of building generation plants for both wind and solar are still much more expensive per kilowatt generated than for natural gas. These costs must be allocated to generation and reflected in prices even though renewable generators have no fuel costs. The question remains though; if a wind or solar farm generates enough electricity with no fuel costs, can they lower their overall costs to be competitive with the cost of generating with natural gas? The short answer is no. There are several reasons for this.
One is that solar and wind cannot always generate electricity when it is needed. Solar, for instance, only generates electricity during the day. As the authors of The Problem with Solar explain,
The dirty little secret is that, at the scale relevant to most people, solar generation’s cost advantage is sort of beside the point. For solar to serve as the backbone of a grid, it needs to be backed with storage. That can come in the form of batteries, hydrogen, or pumped hydro. All of these are expensive; none of them scale. Storing a kilowatt-hour of electricity in a chemical battery costs an order of magnitude more than just generating it in a nuclear power plant. Which is why a 100% solar grid would be insanely expensive …
Wind has a similar problem; it is most productive at night when less power is needed. Of course, the problems solar and wind can offset each other so the cost of dealing with the intermittency of wind and solar might be somewhat mitigated by operating them together. But only somewhat. Batteries are still needed to make up for the gaps between the two, for instance around sunset, but also for when wind and solar underperform because of changing weather. What this means is that renewable generators must account for the cost of batteries much like fossil fuel generators have to do with fuel. And as the EIA data tells us batteries cost more than natural gas or coal.
Additionally, there are other costs associated with the intermittency and underperformance of renewables which we will examine in the next section.
Three Examples: Renewables on a Grid
The EIA data is very helpful in determining how expensive it is to build and operate facilities that generate electricity from wind and solar. Yet the data from EIA and most other efforts to compare the costs of generation across fuel types ignore the fact that the facilities do not operate in a vacuum. Instead, generating plants must operate on a grid where maintaining reliability is mandatory. Not only can reliability issues cause customers to lose power, but they can shut down entire grids if the balance of supply (generation) and demand (load) are not maintained within razor thin margins. In this section we’ll examine the reliability and total costs of renewables on grids in three different regions of the country.
The Pacific Northwest: Zero Fuel Costs Don’t Help Consumers
The high cost of renewable energy operating on a grid where load must be met and reliability maintained is captured in a recent Discovery Institute study, The Crippling Costs of Electrification and Net Zero Energy Policies in the Pacific Northwest. The authors, Jonathan Lesser and Mitchell Rolling, examine the cost of policies calling for electrification of energy use in Washington and Oregon through laws that mandate 100% of cars be electric by 2035 and that heating for homes and businesses be provided by electric heat pumps by 2050.
The study estimates that these policies will require a total increase in electricity consumption of 54,057 gigawatt hours, representing a 40% increase over 2023 electricity sales in the two states. While significant for those states, to put this in a broader context, this increase is only slightly more than the estimated 49,155 gigawatt hours Texas’ electricity demand is expected to increase in 2025.
Because “Oregon law HB 2021 requires the state’s electric utilities to eliminate all fossil-fuel generation and supply 100% zero-emissions electricity by 2040,” the study assumes that all the new electricity required for electrification will be generated by renewable energy. For comparison, it estimates how much it would cost to generate the mandate-driven increase in demand from natural gas and nuclear power. Figure 3 provides the results.
| Figure 3: Total Cost of New Generation in Washington & Oregan Through 2050 (Millions of $) | ||||||
| Scenario | Capital Costs | Fixed O&M Costs | Variable Costs | Taxes | Utility Profits | Total Costs |
| Renewables Only | $232,791 | $73,229 | ($11,381) | $48,363 | $206,909 | $549,910 |
| Natural Gas and Nuclear | $17,953 | $7,282 | $3,226 | $10.89 | $46,587 | $46,587 |
Source: Lesser and Rolling
The cost of using renewables to generate enough electricity to meet the increased load is $549 billion, more than 10 times the cost if the demand is met using natural gas and nuclear. While the savings in fuel (variable) costs are significant, they are overwhelmed by the higher capital and fixed costs of renewables—and the profits of renewable generators. The study found that this would result in the bill of the average residential customer increasing $600 a month by 2050, with a similar increase for commercial customers.
The authors of the Discovery Institute point out that these costs might be reduced in two ways. The first is by managing the load, i.e., by reducing access to power for certain users, such as those who want to charge their electric cars. Second, they note, “Costs can also be lowered by reducing the reliability of the electric system, in other words, making blackouts more likely to occur because there is insufficient generating and transmission capacity to meet increased electricity demand.” Neither of these should be acceptable to policymakers or consumers.
New England: Curtailment, Overbuilding, and Load Balancing
One reason the fixed costs of wind and solar (and batteries) are much higher than for natural gas and nuclear is because renewables are much less efficient; the thermal generators have a much superior energy density. But there is another reason.
As Isaac Orr, Mitch Rolling, and Trevor Lewis explain in their paper examining the cost of renewables in New England, the intermittency of wind and solar also adds significant costs to renewable generation: “It is important to understand that the costs associated with load balancing, overbuilding and curtailment increase dramatically because the amount of wind, solar and battery storage must be ‘overbuilt’ to account for the intermittency of wind and solar.”
New England’s Decarbonization Plans
Figure 4 (below) shows the cost the decarbonization plans of the New England states will impose on the grid—and the people of New England by 2050. The costs of using wind and solar to generate the electricity needed to meet increased demand are at least three to five times higher than the cost of using coal or natural gas. The curtailment, overbuilding, and load balancing add greatly to the costs. In fact, curtailment, overbuilding, and load balancing are higher than the direct cost of generating electricity with coal or natural gas.
Again, this takes into account the zero fuel costs for wind and solar.
Figure 4. All-In Cost per Megawatt-hour of Meeting
Source: Orr, Rolling, and Lewis.
Texas
Despite its reputation as a conservative state that leads the nation in the production of oil and natural gas, Texas is also the leading producer of electricity from renewable energy and has been actively promoting renewables since 1999. (The backstory is here.)
In fact, Texas probably leads all other states in providing subsidies for renewables, having paid out almost $20 billion of Texans’ wealth to multinational corporations and other participants in the renewables industry.
Nationally, wind and solar account for only 18% of the electricity generated. But in Texas, they account for 34%. Take Texas out of the national numbers, and the Texas output of renewables more than doubles that of the rest of the national grid. Unlike the previous two examples, the problems caused by renewables in Texas are not projected, they are real, causing harm and imposing significant costs on the Texas economy today.
Figure 5 (below) helps explain the cost renewables are imposing on the Texas grid. In 2014, renewables passed the 10% grid penetration mark. At about the same time, Texas officials started taking action based on concerns about the effects of renewables on the ERCOT grid, which covers about 90% of the state. Their actions were focused on two issues: the increasing reliability challenges the grid was facing because of the intermittency of renewables and the lack of investment in new dispatchable sources of generation such as natural gas that were having a hard time competing with renewable subsidies.
| Figure 5 Year | Renewable Subsidies | Thermal-focused Subsidies | Texas (ERCOT) Total | % of Renewable Generation |
| 2014 | $1,275,995,355 | $850,495,478 | $2,126,490,833 | 10.8% |
| 2015 | $1,527,364,920 | $1,083,472,123 | $2,610,837,043 | 11.9% |
| 2016 | $1,856,789,699 | $764,679,313 | $2,621,469,012 | 15.3% |
| 2017 | $2,181,736,097 | $820,139,285 | $3,001,875,382 | 17.9% |
| 2018 | $2,544,709,335 | $1,780,468,859 | $4,325,178,194 | 19.4% |
| 2019 | $2,533,784,302 | $6,335,105,059 | $8,868,889,361 | 21.2% |
| 2020 | $2,615,179,107 | $2,721,379,122 | $5,336,558,229 | 25.2% |
| 2021 | $3,563,567,563 | $16,944,745,697 | $20,508,313,259 | 28.4% |
| 2022 | $3,506,142,527 | $11,429,824,388 | $14,935,966,916 | 30.7% |
| 2023 | $4,035,263,673 | $15,928,559,292 | $19,963,822,965 | 31.6% |
Unfortunately, Texas did nothing to stop the growth of renewables, such as ending state and local renewable subsidies. Instead, policymakers began subsidizing thermal generation to bring more dispatchable, primarily natural gas, generation to Texas. Within a few years, the amount of subsidies increased substantially, first in 2019 and then in 2021 after Winter Storm Uri precipitated perhaps the worst blackout in U.S. history. The blackout was caused not only by the poor performance of wind and solar at critical times during Uri, but also because renewable subsidies led to very little investment in natural gas generation that could have kept the lights on.
Most, though not all, of the thermal-focused subsidies in Figure 5 can be attributed to the reaction to renewables—some are other socialized costs built into the system. Taking the average from 2014 through 2018, before renewables reached 20% penetration on the grid, provides a rough estimate of $1 billion of costs not attributable to renewables. Subtracting these costs from Figure 5, suggests that the cost of Texas’ efforts to avoid and correct the harm imposed by renewables from 2019 through 2023 averaged about $9.6 billion a year, for a total cost of $48.4 billion. And more is coming in future years.
Texas policymakers might have somewhat missed the mark in dealing with the reliability problems caused by wind and solar generation; the actual costs might be higher or lower. But the concerns about the effects on grid reliability are real and Texas provides the best example of the real-world costs of dealing with them. The costs are real and must be paid for by Texans.
Conclusion
The data make it clear that the only possible rationale for renewable energy—making significant reductions of CO2 emissions—cannot be achieved. The costs of attempting to do this are already imposing heavy costs on economies across the world and will rapidly escalate as the grid penetration of renewables increases. As several European countries have already experienced as they plunged into energy poverty, the costs are simply too great for any society to pay.
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Say what?
Wind was certainly in use, but replaced by steam as fast as possible, since it was neither reliable, predictable, nor strong. If “mature” means “at its natural limit”, I’ll go along with that. If “successful” means worked at low levels, sometimes, I think we have different dictionaries.
And solar? For growing crops, sure. For melting snow in the spring, sure. For anything else? Where? How?
Exactly the question I was going to ask.
Magnifying glasses were used to light candles, oh wait, same problem we have today.
In the year 1767, a Swiss scientist, Horace-Benedict de Saussure created the first solar oven.
That’s a good one, about on par with solar tech today.
Yep, that was my first thought too, and then I couldn’t focus on the rest of the article.
i made 0.40$ today. that’s tangible.
somewhere.
If you took it in pennies, it has an intrinsic value of $0.80.
“One of the myths about wind and solar generation is that it has an advantage over fossil fuels because it has no fuel costs.”
It isn’t a myth. It is a very concrete and easily calculated advantage. But a bizarre feature of this rant is that it nowhere includes fuel costs in the calculation of CCGT and other FF. Just capital and recurrent costs like O&M.
That is characteristic of such discussions here. They say the fuel cost advantage of W&S must be overwhelmed by other costs. But the fuel cost of FF is never actually calculated, and usually neither are these supposed balancing costs.
Figure 4 shows that onshore wind is more expensive than simple cycle combustion turbines even without the curtailment/overbuilding costs included for wind. CCGT is even cheaper.
CCGT plants can usually be sited to make use of existing grid connections and natural gas supply this avoiding the need to build transmission lines to the windfarm. CCGT plants are also dispatchable, meaning that plant output can be adjusted to meet frequency control needs and maintain grid stability – you really don’t a major transmission line pulling out of synchronism. CCGT plants also provide varying VAR flows as well as inherent voltage regulation due to the nature of an alternator. Lastly, CCGT plants provide inertia to damp out the effects of a sudden load change or generation tripping.
“Figure 4 shows that onshore wind is more expensive”
Fig 4 seems to be some notional costing for New England in 2050. Numbers are sourced from the Yankee Institute, which campaigns against decarbonization.
But again, what you write is just arm-waving without numbers. The fuel cost disparity is obvious. But, without figuring what it actually, you list a whole lot of uncosted items which are supposed to exceed it.
Nick we know you don’t agree we any numbers because we haven’t added in the ever increasing and very random social cost of carbon 🙂
Not sure any of us want to play your game of faux outrage and crazy midirection.
I’ve said nothing about the social cost of carbon.
I’m talking about the very concrete cost of fuel. Just not in the accounting.
The actual costs of collecting fossil fuels, excluding government duties, taxes, levies and royalties, is almost irrelevant.
What is very relevant is the price the electricity generator has to pay for fuel.
NO. What is VERY relevant is WHAT THE RATEPAYERS HAVE TO PAY for electricity.
The more worse-than-useless wind and solar get added to the grid, the more the price of electricity increases – and the less reliable the grid becomes.
LOSE-LOSE
“I’m talking about the very concrete cost of fuel.”
speaking of concrete,,,this is the image the masses are fed regarding wind turbines.
and this is what the masses never see. yes nick, that rebar jungle will be filled with concrete. no fuel cost my ass!
my state of michigan has more than 1600 of these and they will be in the ground for ever.
Glaciers might grind them out of the ground.
Concrete is very energy and CO2 intensive
On a mine to hazardous landfill basis, wind and solar has about the same CO2/kWh as gas-fired, 60% efficient CCGT plants.
Frack, Baby, Frack.
NEW ENGLAND ELECTRICITY 100% FROM WIND AND SOLAR by 2050?
In New England, we have Net Zero nut cases. They know nothing about energy systems, but spout lots of nonsense.
“Keep it in the ground”, they say. “All electricity from wind and solar”, they say.
When presented with numbers and facts their eyes glaze over
Here is a simple analysis, if no fossil fuels, no nuclear, and minimal other sources of electricity
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/vermont-example-of-electricity-storage-with-tesla-powerwall-2-0s
.
It is assumed, 1) all W/S output, based on historic weather data, is loaded into batteries, 2) all demand is drawn from batteries, based on historic load on the grid, as published by ISO-NE.
An annual storage balance was created, which needed to stay well above zero; the batteries are not allowed to “run dry” in bad W/S years. The balance was used to determine the wind and solar capacities needed to achieve it.
.
New England would need a battery storage system with a capacity of about 10 TWh of DELIVERABLE electricity from batteries to the HV grid.
Daily W/S output would be fed to the batteries, 140 TWh/y
Daily demand would be drawn from the batteries, 115 TWh/y in 2024
Battery system roundtrip loss, HV to HV, would be 25 TWh/y, more with aging
Transmission and Distribution to users incur additional losses of about 8%, or 0.08 x 115 = 9.2 TWh
The battery system would cover any multi-day W/S lulls throughout the year
Batteries would supplement W/S output, as needed, 24/7/365
W/S would charge excess output into the batteries, 24/7/365
Tesla recommends not charging to more than 80% full and not discharging to less than 20% full, to achieve normal life of 15 years and normal aging at 1.5%/y.
The INSTALLED battery capacity would need to be about 10 TWh / (0.6, Tesla factor x aging factor x 0.9, outage factor) = 18.5 TWh, delivered as AC at battery outlet.
The turnkey cost would be about $600/installed kWh, delivered as AC at battery outlet, 2024 pricing, or $600/kWh x 18.5 billion kWh = $11.1 trillion, about every 15 years.
I did not mention annually increasing insurance costs of risky W/S projects.
If 50% were borrowed from banks, the cost of amortizing $5.5 trillion at 6% over 15 years = $557 billion/y
If 50% were from Owners, the cost of amortizing $5.5 trillion at 10% over 15 years = $708 billion/y
The two items total $1265 billion/y, about the same as the New England GDP.
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
.
No banks will finance W/S projects at acceptable interest rates and no insurance companies will insure them at acceptable premiums, no matter what the woke bureaucrats in are pronouncing.
The sooner the U-turn, the better for the US and Europe
I like Yankee Institute already!
No person or indeed organisation needs to campaign against de-carbonization, as ‘de-carbonization’ is a green, lefty Marxist utopian fairytale, that does not relate in any way to reality.
So called ‘de-carbonization’ has not happened; it will not happen.
The green blob is eating itself into extinction.
I’m for decarbonization of beer. In my belly.
Should the green blob go extinct, they will de-carbonize.
At least with replaceable fuel sourced generation you can add more fuel when needed.
You can’t add more sun at night when it’s needed
and…
You can’t add more wind if it isn’t blowing or stem the flow if its blowing too hard.
Any day now Nick is going to bring us his list of all the countries that enjoy lower electricity rates and higher reliability from increased wind and solar! One sure sign of the well indoctrinated mind is continual arguing against reality!
There you go again. I would have thought by now you would have grown too embarrassed to keep repeating that.
The fact that wind is free is as close to meaningless as you can get and only someone who knows nothing about either engineering or economics would cling to it.
First off, fuel is one of the lowest if not the lowest cost of running a power plant. The second is that the cost of fuel for the fossil fuel power plants that are needed to back up your magical wind and solar only goes down a tiny fraction when wind and solar are producing. The reason for this is that as you are well aware, wind and solar are unreliable, either could start to cut out with only a few minutes warning, at best. So, the fossil fuel plant needs to be on either warm or hot standby.
If you want to increase the warning time for wind/solar to say 30 minutes, you can do that. Unfortunately, the cost of doing that is 100s of billions of dollars in batteries, plus 100s of billions of extra wind and solar in order to charge those batteries so that they will be full when they are needed.
…and more trillions to replace all of the infrastructure every 15-20 years, plus more trillions when the batteries burn up…and on and on and on.
Sorry, Mark, but widely known in the power industry that fossil fuel costs are a major cost. That’s why millions of dollars are spent on making them as efficient as possible. Now that is not the same for nuclear plants, their fuel costs are relatively lower than the capital and O&M costs.
Well here are the fuel and operating costs for one company in Australia (AGL) in from their annual report
Their total operating costs were AU$1.787B
Their fuel costs for 2024 were AU$0.726B
And they appear to have additionally purchased AU$1.106B of gas
Wood, oil, coal, water, and nuclear have no fuel costs either. All those trees, the oil deposits, coal beds, rainfall, uranium, those are all free raw materials too.
It’s turning them from raw materials into useful resources that costs money, and the same applies to solar and wind. TANSTAAFL.
The generator pays real money for fuel. For wind and sun – none.
The pay for the fuel is to extract it and refine it. What do you think PVC panels and wind turbines cost, $0? They cost a fortune for what little power they generate, and have to be replaced 5-10 times as often as boilers and turbines. Batteries cost a fortune in rare earth metals and child slave labor. You think dams are free? You must be thinking of slave beavers.
And when it’s needed the fueled generator produces power on demand
Wind and Solar you can’t add their fuel when needed. They’re either on or off at the whims of weather or time of day. Free Fuel is unreliable and often unavailable when needed.
This is the Stacking the Deck logical fallacy.
No, its capex vs opex.
Most here appreciate the difference but not everyone.
The RATEPAYERS pay lots more when worse-than-useless wind and solar are added to the grid. The more worse-than-useless wind and solar are added, the higher the rates get.
That’s ALL that matters. Stop obfuscating. Electric rates were cheaper, and the grid was more reliable, when “fuel” provided ALL electric generation.
However, the fuel costs over the lifetime of the Gas Facility are significantly lower than the initial costs of manufacturing, transportation, installation and maintenance of either Solar or Wind (both onshore and offshore) and the Gas Plant will last 2-3 times longer while the wind and solar will be built and rebuilt after storms or replaced every 15-20 years from age.
Nick, you are guilty of exactly the same thing you are accusing the others of. You keep claiming that wind and solar have zero fuel costs, and that this makes investment in them cost effective compared to gas or coal. But while you reproach them for not giving numbers, you never give any numbers yourself to back up your claims.
The fallacies in your usual arguments are:
Do a calculation and show how much fuel is actually saved in a typical real world environment by having and running sufficient rapid start gas as opposed to continuous running CCGT.
Do a calculation putting in all the costs, including the fuel costs of the backup, and only counting as output the production which coincides with demand, and is thus of some use. You’ll end up with much lower capacity factors than those usually used in LCOE calculations, which effectively assume that all power generated is economically valuable, no matter when its generated. It is not.
You can get all the data you need for these calculations for a real world example, the UK, from gridwatch.templar.co.uk. What you are posting now is no more than arm waving. If you think that fuel savings is so economically important, and that public policy and huge investments should be based on it, do the math and put up the sums. Simplified is fine, it should fit on no more than one A4 page.
But I keep challenging you to do this and produce a quantified justification, and you keep not doing it, so increasingly one suspects that it can’t be done, and that maybe you know it, but are not yet prepared to admit it.
“But while you reproach them for not giving numbers, you never give any numbers yourself to back up your claims.”
I am commenting here on a post which purports to be a comparison of CCGT and W&S, but makes no mention of fuel costs at all. And it is easy to work out. Just divide the fuel price by the efficiency factor.
Against that people set a whole lot of nebulous costs. Take this one:
“Much of the plant has to be either in standby or rapid start so lowering its fuel efficiency.”
As I understand it, just not true. Here is GE describing their 9HA turbine. Starts from cold in 30 mins. Well within battery range. But of course the wind for the whole country doesn’t just go from full on to calm without warning.
“generate uselessly”
You can actually switch them off. Or export or something. At least charge up the batteries.
“LCOE calculations also invariably leave out the capital costs of transmission”
They leave out the costs for all modes, because it isn’t a function of the generator. Some will be conveniently placed, some not. But again people want to pile the whole cost onto W&S. There was already a grid that cost a lot to build. How do you cost that?
Transmission also has to be constantly expanded to cope with shifting demand.
“running costs of the gas or coal needed to cover calms and nights and solar winters”
That is double counting. People who generate that power get paid for it, often handsomely
It is a normal market transaction. And of course if W&S didn’t exist, they’d still be doing it, only more so.
You are still claiming that wind and solar have no fuel costs. And that is simply not true. They do. They have the fuel and capital and other costs of the installations that have to be used to cover intermittent failures to produce.
The point about useless generation is not an operational one. Its an accounting point. When you calculate LCOE you divide by the MWh produced over the life of the installation into the NPV of the cash flows. In the case of wind, this amount should be net, you have to deduct the amount of power generated when there is no demand for it. To do otherwise is false accounting. But no-one ever does that.
The right way to do the comparison, which no-one ever does, and I suspect the reason is what it will show, is as follows. You have to compare two systems, one running solely on conventional, the other running on a mix of conventional plus wind and/or solar. You have to do it for a real world situation where there is data available, for instance the UK. You have to take all costs into account.
If you are right, then the result will show that it pays to install the wind/solar. So why are there no studies which prove it? Why don’t you do one and prove it?
By the way, on transmission. When doing NPV analysis you ignore sunk costs. So the reason why you should include the extra costs of transmission for wind based solutions is that they are incremental costs required for wind. You don’t include them for gas plant, because it will use the existing transmission, and those costs are sunk.
Accounting 101. Brealey and Myers.
Lazards have finally recognised that their LCOE neglected the cost required to provide power when unreliables are unable to meet load demand. It only took them 16 years , how long will it take Nick to do likewise?
Bullshit. It’s quite easy to compare electric rates prior to any meaningful wind and solar penetration to after significant wind and solar penetration.
More wind and solar penetration = higher electricity prices. AND THAT’S WHAT MATTERS.
Then calculate it for us ignorant peasants, please. Take into account all of the following for every source:
Capital infrastructure per annum (pa) costs
Additional infrastructure pa costs (additional access, transmission, conversion, balancing and storage costs)
Maintenance pa costs
Land pa costs
Decommissioning pa costs
Add in any subsidies provided (these do not include normal tax deductions for depreciation, nor deductions of fuel duties for off-road use such as farmers are allowed).
Deduct any taxes/royalties etc charged for natural resources.
Only include real costs and real subsidies.
Nick,
Your reply illustrates my thinking is that the reason lay persons are as supportive of renewable is that they assume because you can generate electricity from them then they are an equivalent to conventional generation. The only renewable that is an equivalent is hydro.
Renewables are practically and technically unsuited for large scale grid supply. They cause instability and require considerable support for them to do what they do. This is a duplication of generation capacity with similar capacities of conventional to renewables.
You may look at grid figures and see wind is 60% of demand and gas at 10%, however despite the small contribution in power it will still be providing inertia, reactive power and short circuit current level input, which renewables cannot.
Take the gas away then the grid would quickly fail.
While wind is free it is expensive to capture both in terms of the vast quantity of tiny generators required and the infrastructure to connect them. They also have a deteriorating output with time and require replacement twice as often if not more than conventional. Plus the duplicate system I mentioned.
You cannot argue that countries with high renewables capacity also do not have very high unit cost to the consumer.
“which renewables cannot”
Well, something can. You can use synchronous condensers, which still have the rotary inertia but need only a small amount of power to drive them, or a static VAR compensator, with no moving parts.
Yes. Its comparing apples and oranges. The only way to do a proper comparison is by requiring the products or services being provided to be equivalent – substitutable.
Nick gets very close to arguing that we should install wind to supplement an existing conventional grid because it will save on fuel costs. This is not any kind of energy transition, its a last resort justification of wind and solar, when the evidence makes it indubitable that you cannot run on wind, solar and batteries alone.
Its called ‘backup’, but that is a very misleading term in this context. You can run on gas, with or without wind and solar. But you cannot run on wind and solar without gas. So what’s really going on is not backup of wind by gas, its supplementing gas with wind.
Nick says a country does not go from high wind to zero without notice. It does. Take a look at gridwatch.co.uk, it just happened. This is why wind is best regarded as a supplement. I want to see the financial case why it makes sense to install it on this basis, but haven’t ever found one. Don’t believe it can be made.
Don’t be too hard on poor Nick! Every day he has to deal with being b’slapped by reality! He’d much rather be lying back on his cozy couch; adding up all the money he saves from his off grid home PV system, and making a list all the countries that lowered electric rates by adding wind and solar!
I think that one would top the “world’s shortest list” list.
And once you stop giving the intermittent sources “priority” for use of what they produce, the artificial economic case for their construction ends in the blink of an eye.
Which is exactly what should happen.
Fuel costs are an operating cost and thus rightly are accounted for under O&M.
It wouldn’t be right. But anyway, they aren’t. Fuel costs are much larger.
“It isn’t a myth. It is a very concrete and easily calculated advantage. “
Only if you ignore, which you do, the fact that wind and solar require FF backup generation. Since those resources have to be always ready, the cost of their fuel has to be added to the cost of wind and solar. Period. Why do you ignore this?
There is a big difference in the fuel cost between being ready and actually generating.
So then where is the “Carbon Cost” for Wind and Solar for the gas used to keep the generators in Stand By Mode. It.isn’t THAT insignificant.
I hear standby or “spinning reserve” uses 40% of the gas for full operation.
And that does *not* include inefficiently ramping up and down to manage frequency variation caused by prioritizing inconsistent wind and solar.
And how often will W&S require backups to be “actually generating”?
The only honest thing to do is factor in all the costs of the backup into the cost of the “primary”.
Not big enough to justify the gigantic costs of grid connected wind and solar.
Check the electric bills pre and post wind and solar penetration in Germany for a perfect example.
Yes. Wind and solar, when installed and operating, require no fuel. That is an advantage.
It is an advantage but not sufficiently great to justify those components in the system as a whole.
Any single component can have advantages and disadvantages, but it is not the individual component that defines the performance of the system.
When the full system is taken into account, wind and solar just do not stack up. One also has to include predicted lifespan and MTBF (mean time between failures) and maintenance, repari, and disposal costs. The total life cycle costs of the components and the system.
As seen today, this is fair. What about as seen in the future when we still dont have fusion and we’re having real troubles hitting fossil fuel supply to satisfy global energy demand?
Might it have “stacked up” under those conditions?
If you don’t have mineral energy to provide power, you certainly don’t have it to build worse-than-useless windmills and solar panels. And replace them every two decades.
Figure 3 is a mess, including the incorrect spelling of Oregon. Other figures are poorly formatted.
Note, also, that if Heat Pumps are required in WA & OR most buildings will also need a second source of heat. I have wood. As I write (2/10/2025) my local temperature is headed toward 5°F for the next three mornings.
I think President Trump should impose tariffs on Canadian air masses.
Did I understand this right? The solution for highly subsidized renewables failure was to give higher subsidies to thermal? What the hell is wrong with these people? Wind and solar don’t work, stop building them. Fossil fuel and nuclear work, build them. Remove wind and solar from the grid.
Not quite. Thermal is given higher taxes, not subsidies. Ever-increasing royalties for gathering it, and even fossil fuel companies are taxed 40% instead of 30% (or similar) in many countries. In the UK, 5% is added to energy bills to pay green subsidies.
Fossil fuels are the most highly taxed products on the planet. Most developed countries would go bankrupt almost immediately without said taxes.
Asked AI – hmmm
Let’s break down the estimated costs over 20 years for both options:
Combined Cycle Gas Turbine (CCGT) Plant with CANSOLV CO₂ Capture System
Initial Investment: Approximately \$1.5 billion for a 600 MW plant.Operational Costs: Around \$100 million per year, including fuel, maintenance, and labor.CO₂ Capture System Costs: Additional \$200 million for installation and \$50 million annually for operation.Total Cost Over 20 Years: Approximately \$3.5 billion.Solar Power with Tesla Batteries
Initial Investment: Approximately \$1 billion for a 600 MW plant.Operational Costs: Around \$10 million per year, mainly for maintenance.Battery Costs: Around \$16,800 per Powerwall, with most homes needing 1-2 units. Assuming 2 Powerwalls per MW, the cost would be around \$33.6 million for a 600 MW plant2.Total Cost Over 20 Years: Approximately \$1.2 billion.Why is the cost proportionally different than the article? I say get rid of the subsidize and let the power industry compete for the best systems.
Wind and sun are now the cheapest way to produce electricity.
Explainer: what does it actually mean to ‘firm’ renewables?
But hooking up all the rooftop solar commercial solar factories and wind turbines and matching up the voltage and frequency is where big costs come in. Then it needs to be dispatchable when consumers actually require it so add on that cost and poor old struggletown can’t pay their power bills. That’s how boofheads numpties charlatans and carpetbaggers get to say Wind and sun are now the cheapest way to produce electricity just like the rain that falls from the sky is the cheapest form of fresh water. Duh!
Very misleading for the author to state the capacity factor for natural gas generation is 59.7% without explaining it would be 85% or higher for CCGT generation if not forced to operate start/stop/warm standby/cold standby to accommodate nuisance wind and solar and that 59.7% value includes single shaft turbines used for peaking.
And the “benefits” are non-existent, on multiple levels.
A warmer climate is BETTER, not worse.There is no empirical evidence that CO2 is the cause of the warming in any event.China, India and other so-called “developing” countries, all rapidly increasing their “emissions,” will erase any (completely unnecessary) reductions made in “developed” countries in any event.