First, this great article from Forbes:
If Solar And Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive?
Over the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.
People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.
And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.
And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.
Electricity prices increased by:
-
- 51 percent in Germany during its expansion of solar and wind energy from 2006 to 2016;
- 24 percent in California during its solar energy build-out from 2011 to 2017;
- over 100 percent in Denmark since 1995 when it began deploying renewables (mostly wind) in earnest.
What gives? If solar panels and wind turbines became so much cheaper, why did the price of electricity rise instead of decline?
The author puts forward several hypotheses and then says this:
The main reason appears to have been predicted by a young German economist in 2013.
In a paper for Energy Policy, Leon Hirth estimated that the economic value of wind and solar would decline significantly as they become a larger part of electricity supply.
The reason? Their fundamentally unreliable nature. Both solar and wind produce too much energy when societies don’t need it, and not enough when they do.
Solar and wind thus require that natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries or some other form of reliable power be ready at a moment’s notice to start churning out electricity when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining.
And unreliability requires solar- and/or wind-heavy places like Germany, California and Denmark to pay neighboring nations or states to take their solar and wind energy when they are producing too much of it.
Hirth predicted that the economic value of wind on the European grid would decline 40 percent once it becomes 30 percent of electricity while the value of solar would drop by 50 percent when it got to just 15 percent.
The natural gas plants have to be running on hot standby as if they are completely shut down, it takes ten minutes or so for them to start. An interesting read - well worth your time.
Secondly, when the government removes the subsidies (ie: our tax dollars), the economics of alt.energy come crashing back down to reality. From James Delingpole writing at Breitbart:
Germany’s Solar Industry Crashes and Burns
Germany’s solar industry has crashed and burned after the government drastically cut its subsidies.
James quotes from a number of sources showing the spike in cost and has this to say:
Germany’s great transition from fossil fuel power to renewables – its Energiewende – will cost the economy an estimated 520 billion Euros ($635 billion) by 2020. This is roughly equal to 25,000 Euros ($30,500) per family of four.
The collapse of solar industry in Germany puts into perspective EPA chief Scott Pruitt’s recent comments on renewables.
“It’s not the job of this agency, or any job in the federal government, to use regulatory power to favor of one sector of the economy over another. And what you saw with the past administration is just that — an attitude that says fossil fuel … is something that should be diminished in favor of, what, renewables. That doesn’t mean renewables shouldn’t be a part of our electricity-generation mix. It should be. But to use regulatory power to favor renewables at the expense natural gas, oil and coal is just something that’s not within the regulatory powers of this agency. And so we’re fixing that.’
Wise words. The second article is well worth reading too. A harbinger of what we will face if we go overboard with the idea of renewable energy. It is a rat hole. We should be persuing Thorium reactors instead of this.
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