Posted on 10/20/2021 3:56:11 AM PDT by Kaslin
The government and big financial institutions promote a fraudulent analysis of the cost of solar and wind electricity. Their narrative is that wind and solar are competitive with traditional fossil fuels and that the cost of wind and solar is rapidly dropping. Academics and the media amplify and spread the fraudulent analysis.
The basis of the fraud is a simple comparison of the cost per kilowatt hour at the plant fence for electricity produced by wind or solar versus electricity produced by a traditional plant. Some or all of the massive subsidies for wind and solar are ignored in such comparisons. With such a rigged comparison, wind or solar may seem competitive.
A proper comparison reveals that wind or solar are five or even ten times more expensive than natural gas or coal electricity. To understand why this is so, we have to explain some basic facts that apply to either wind or solar.
Wind or solar is erratic, intermittent electricity. It comes and goes according to the supply of wind and sunlight. Wind is erratic from day to day and usually has a seasonal cycle. Sunlight depends on clouds, seasons and of course does not work at night. The consequence is that wind or solar electricity supply must be 100% backed up by conventional electricity plants. If 100% backup is neglected, rolling blackouts are the result when there is a lull in wind or solar production. The lull can be of short duration or seasonal.
Residential rooftop solar is backed up by the connection to the electric utility. The utility has to spend money on generating plants and a distribution network to maintain backup for the residential rooftop system. When rooftop solar is present, the utility is usually undercompensated for providing the backup service.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Ohhh, I get it - you're a climate denier. If I believed in heaven or hell there would be a special place in the latter for you - but I don't believe in fairly tales, only wind and solar....
The powers that be know that wind and solar will not work even at several times the price. It is a ruse to destroy all us peons.
top people are working on it. they will fix all these problems if we just spend enough money on them. spending is the solution.
for instance, make the solar panels mobile and move them to where the sun is shining. eazy peazy.
the intermittent wind problem is solved by simply placing the wind turbines near a fan. problem solved.
cmon man! we can do this. we just have to spend more money.
BTW in my hometown in Germany the electric company pruduces electricity via a creek that is in the area.
after Biden, Pelosi, Sanders et al, get their mansions converted to nothing but wind & solar power - at their own expense - only then can we talk about government mandates.
and these would still be unconstitutional
Anyone here who thinks that liberals, or at least their leaders do not understand the far higher cost of alternative energy literally has NO CLUE as to who liberals are and what they want.
Can someone educate me about the cost to produce energy via wind and solar? Considering the energy it requires to produce the equipment, to the energy it takes to install and maintain solar and wind generators I suspect the “pay off” in terms of energy savings by using these alternatives is very small if there is really any saving at all. Certainly this calculation has been done and is known to someone, curious minds would like to know !
There is also non-mandated green energy goals:
“Xcel Energy Announces 2030 Clean Energy Plan to Reduce Carbon Emissions 85%”
https://investors.xcelenergy.com/news-market-information/press-releases/press-release/2021/Xcel-Energy-Announces-2030-Clean-Energy-Plan-to-Reduce-Carbon-Emissions-85/default.aspx
This will be “interesting”, I guess, seeing where our electricity costs really go. Xcel is also putting in the smart meters...
The payoff is about five years or less. Why? Because all you need to do is get overpaid for your unreliable power and underpay for backup from a reliable grid.
If you had to use solar and battery your payoff would be very small if any. Your statement would be absolutely correct. But that's not how it works. Unreliable solar is heavily subsidized here in Virginia. You buy solar panels for 50 cents a Watt. If you get 25 cent panels the 50 cents would include all installation and installation hardware. So say 50 cents. In Virginia one Watt of panel will produce 1.6 kWh of power every year, with average cloudiness. In other words you will get 1600 Watt-hours of power every year from a one watt panel. In other word, full sun or equivalent partial sun for 1600 hours a year.
1.6 kWh will fetch 12 cents in Virginia thanks to the net metering subsidy. Even though your 1.6 kWh is unreliable you get paid full retail for it, instead of the utility buying reliable wholesale power for 3 or 4 cents. So in essence every other rate payer is paying the subsidy.
Now remember how much the 1W panel cost: 50 cents. How much you get every year from the power company: 19.2 cents. Great payoff. Spectacular really. But not great for your neighbors. You are screwing them over.
1.0 kWh will fetch 12 cents in Virginia. 1.6 kWh will fetch 19.2 cents in Virginia
Still, the cost/benefit ratios of wind and solar are highly unfavorable, and no amount of money applied to the current technology is ever going to improve that ratio.
Now solar power can work, IF collection panels are placed in geosynchronous orbit above fixed points, and the power generated is aimed down on a tight microwave beam to a receiving station on earth. In a geosynchronous orbit, the panels are exposed to sunlight on a near-continuous basis.
The other part of this design would involve the development of superconductors that work at ambient temperatures on the earth’s surface, for the efficient distribution of the power generated and transmitted to point of use.
Wind power shall always remain notoriously unreliable in most places except where there is a pass near the summit of high mountain ranges. Again, there is an abiding need for ambient temperature superconductors to transmit this power from such remote locations.
The whole objective for making the world reliant on wind and solar power generation is to create scarcity and random loss of power altogether. The one true source of wealth is to use abundant (and relatively inexpensive) energy to convert raw materials and other resources into useful products and render timely and beneficial services as needed.
There is no such thing as “free” energy. Everything has a cost, the only way to measure is to apply an accurate cost-benefit ratio in an acceptable range.
I agree wholeheartedly with the payoff being good only with tax breaks plus net metering (where the state forces the utility to pay for your excess power almost at the same rate you buy power from them). If I had my way solar wouldn't be subsidized, tax credited, or forced onto people or companies that don't want it. Also if I had my way we'd have a flat income tax or fair tax with no credits/debits.
Until I get my way on the fair tax I'll take whatever tax deductions/credits I can. Likewise, I bought solar for my house. And I don't live in a net metering state: I don't sell excess power back to the power company because my state would require me to pay a high monthly fee to "participate" in it. Imagine Amazon charging you $1,000 annually for prime membership so you can save $150 to $200 in shipping. Would you take it? Of course not. For that same reason I don't sell power back to my power company.
Thus, my payback period is 13 to 15 years. I knew that going in and I still did it. Why? Because I'm nearing retirement, my wealth is already high enough to live on in retirement, and I used a tiny portion of that wealth to pre-pay for electricity (by paying for a large solar installation) to give me a kind of insurance in case power rates increase greatly. About 2/3rds of my power comes from my solar. If the power rates were to skyrocket more (like they've done for the past couple of years) I'll fuss over it about 1/3rd as much as I otherwise would when I make my budget every month.
For the same reason I'm converting my gas appliances to electric (so that my "free" solar can power a larger portion of my house). I estimate about 50% of my power for those new appliances will come from solar (because I can't keep adding to the electrical load of my house while expecting the solar system to increase as well). Likewise, I plan to buy an electric vehicle soon (but my wife and I will keep a gas car so that we have the best of both worlds). Thus, the energy portion of my monthly budget will be concentrated on electricity rates. And if they skyrocket I'll grumble less about it because my solar system makes me less dependent on my utility monopoly and their cronies in state government. If the power rates I have to pay rise too much I can always expand my solar system (though to do it more than what I have now would admittedly get a lower ROI than the first portion I did).
Basically, if being libertarian is as much about freedom from state government control as it is about federal government control, nothing has made me feel more libertarian than taking control of a huge portion of my energy needs.
But from a technical standpoint, none of this works well at the utility level. The only reason I'm able to get a decent throughput for my solar costs is because I studied over a year's worth of my power consumption per month and had a solar system made specifically for my needs. Likewise with converting my gas appliances to electric -- I'm being specific with the technical specs of my solar inverter so that they work with my solar system while giving us the same comfort we're used to. There's no way this can be done as efficiently on a utility company scale, even without the weird regulations they have to follow and the 10% for the big guys, etc. It's too much to expect them to build a one-size-fits-all system that's as efficient as my one-size-fits-my-house system.
I’ve been wondering about this for a while: how much do each of those huge windmills cost to build? How can they recoup that cost?
Can someone educate me about the cost to produce energy via wind and solar? Considering the energy it requires to produce the equipment, to the energy it takes to install and maintain solar and wind generators I suspect the “pay off” in terms of energy savings by using these alternatives is very small if there is really any saving at all....
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It is virtually impossible to answer that question because of all that factors that could go into the calculation and it changes depending on where you are in the country. For example, if windmills go up in a remote location, think of all the roads and powerline infrastructure that need to be built and maintained to support what is ultimately a pitiful and sporadic supply of electricity. To take a slight detour to your question (and to only use one example), one has to wonder how the environmentalists feel about the fact that underneath windmills, there are massive concrete foundations. What do the environmentalists have to say about the fact that CO2 is released as a by-product during calcination (process of manufacturing cement clinker), which occurs in the upper, cooler end of the kiln (or a precalciner) at temperatures of 1,100-1,650°F and results in the conversion of carbonates to oxides? The simplified stoichiometric relationship of CaCO3 + heat —> CaO + CO2 essentially means that for ever ton of cement, there is a ton of CO2 that is released. Well, for a typical 2 MW windmill in Texas, there is approximately 750 to 1,000 tons of concrete that are needed for the concrete foundation. How many years of service will it give before it is scrap? How much other CO2 is released during the rest of the manufacturing and construction?
The answer to the above ‘environmental cost’ question is that “it doesn’t get included” by the environmentalists. It gets ignored completely and that is the problem in believing any numbers that anyone produces. It all becomes a smoke and mirrors game where if one ignores huge factors in the big picture, things can be made to look good. If on the other hand, the factors are all properly calculated and included, things can be made to look horrible. So, to come back to your initial question of “cost to produce energy via wind and solar” and bearing in mind the ‘bigger picture’, here is one big factor that almost never gets included and it essentially means your question has to be restated. Unless wind and solar energy is being generated for the operator’s own on site use, it needs to be integrated on to the grid. That means that it is just one source contributing to an overall electrical supply made up of generators that use nuclear, coal, gas, hydraulic etc. technology. As posed, your question attempts to isolate wind and solar as standalone cost items, and this can’t be done because of the impact that wind and solar has on the grid as a whole and that then gets into the huge issue of how it affects other electrical generators.
In most jurisdictions across the country, wind and solar are given ‘priority access’ to the grid and what this means is that when the wind blows and the sun shines, they can pump electricity on to the grid and since the supply has to match the demand, that means that something else has to back off. If your grid has lots of generators using coal and gas, they at least have the ability to back off. Nuclear units do not have that luxury and can basically only run in two modes — on or off. If one of them has be taken offline, for most of them it’s a 3 day effort to bring them back online and you can imagine the costs of doing that. As for hydraulically produced power, it is always possible to bypass water around the generators if the grid can’t accept the power. That of course is pure waste. As for the coal and the gas generators, if they have to back off, they will be pushed into a reduced load operating mode that becomes progressively less and less efficient. This is such a big deal that some gas generators use open loop instead of combined cycle technology so that they can react faster to the whims of wind of solar and for that case, the amount of gas used relative the amount of electricity produced is off the charts stupid and means that from a big picture perspective, the wind and solar made no meaningful contribution that couldn’t have been supplied with the same amount of gas and no wind and solar.
The bottom line is that the wind and solar generation can’t be isolated in the way your question implies. The only way to make sense of the type of question you are asking is to present a generating scenario of typical daily/weekly/annual demand requirements (to the jurisdiction of your scenario if that is even possible) and then analyze the overall cost of the whole package of generation. Then compare that cost to what happens when new generating sources of wind and solar are added into it. If that is done, I can guarantee you that the costs as represented by wind and solar would so high no one would ever consider them.
Here’s how I would compromise with the greenies:
We’ll call carbon-based energy sources backup sources. You can blab all you want about green energy.
In return, you will guarantee that our backup sources will supply energy in amounts sufficient to keep our energy cheap and always available.
But from a technical standpoint, none of this works well at the utility level.
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Bingo! I couldn’t agree more and in my post 15, I should have mentioned that everything I was prattling on about was at the utility level, not what one does personally. I’m working towards those ends myself and slowly am getting to the point where I can thumb my nose at the ‘electrical providers’. With what they are trying to do at a grid level, I have no confidence that electrical rates everywhere aren’t going to continue to go through the roof.
It’s a twofer. The republic will go down along with the destruction of the middleclass.
“The consequence is that wind or solar electricity supply must be 100% backed up by conventional electricity plants.”
These backup plants already exist.
Electric vehicle batteries will normally be kept nearly full of charge and could be tapped in cases of wind or solar shortfall.
“On a kilowatt hour basis, offshore wind power is estimated to cost 22.15 cents per kilowatt hour, while onshore wind is estimated to cost 8.66 cents per kilowatt hour, and natural gas combined cycle is estimated to cost 6.56 per kilowatt hour.”
https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Offshore-Wind-Energy-DRS-4.pdf
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