Would you trust in perpetuum mobile, if it would make energy more expensive in all countries which adopted it?
Reminds me of an informative Forbes article I came across a few days ago.
The Paradox of Declining Renewable Costs and Rising Electricity Prices
https://www.forbes.com/sites/b…city-prices/#30937bdd61d5
Here's an extract
We will return to that debate in a moment, but for now let’s ask - if the cost of renewable power generation is falling, how can their use cause retail prices to rise?
This paradox is even more striking when we consider that more renewables actually can drive down the wholesale prices that electricity generators are paid. Because variable renewable energy (VRE) resources wind and solar incur virtually all of their costs up front and incur no fuel costs to produce electricity, the average cost of VRE generation is much higher than the marginal cost, which is close to zero. Much electricity in the US is transacted in states with competitive wholesale electricity markets. Marginal costs set prices in competitive markets, which means that the penetration of VRE can push down wholesale power prices, even more so when the VRE resource is receiving a per unit subsidy, as is the case with wind. This is something that has placed financial pressure on legacy resources such as coal, nuclear and natural gas plants that do incur fuel costs and other marginal costs of generation. It would seem, then, that higher renewables should lead to lower electricity prices.
But wholesale prices are paid to the generators; the retail prices paid by final customers reflect the full cost of delivering electricity. Generation, though the largest component, only accounts for 44 percent of the total cost. The other main costs affected by renewables integration are transmission and distribution of electricity to its point of use, reliability costs to maintain stable voltage and frequency, maintenance needed to keep the system running, depreciation and taxes.
Unit costs, however, tell only part of the story. Individual power generators, whether conventional power plants or wind farms, seldom operate in isolation; they are each part of a larger grid-connected system that aggregates power across generators to deliver power to a region of consumers. VRE’s effect on system costs will depend in part on the cost of the electricity that it is displacing, which in turn depends on the location and timing of its deployment. Wind generation at night in the Midwest may be displacing coal, while solar generation in the afternoon in California may be displacing natural gas, each with different cost profiles. And to handle the intermittency of VRE, system operators need to activate ramping resources more frequently to meet demand. These flexible plants are typically more expensive to operate and thus higher deployment can raise total system costs even as renewable costs decline. Moreover, these resources must be kept on hand to provide reliable capacity in a market characterized by more intermittent supply and the costs of maintaining this capacity is passed along to consumers.