A New Equation.
The Sun and Climate Change.
Learning about the Sun.
Cheap as in limited value. And the more wind you install, the higher the prices of retail electricity rise.
You are a very limit skill troll even worse than THH.
The Texas electricity prize is tied to gasoline costs as there are still some classic power plants left. Thanks to wind I expect the company makes tons of cash.
This thinking requires ignoring both physics and economics. The value of solar and wind decline in economic value as they become larger shares of the electricity grid for physical reasons. They produce too much energy when societies don’t need it and not enough energy when they do.
Solar is most efficient if its local. So the USA has to force all owner of large city roofs and all owners that run air-condition to install solar panels. Even brickheads understand that sun maxima are correlated with max energy from panels needed at the same time as air condition is needed...
Large solar farms are not a very clever idea if they are off grid or to far north... as in Germany...
But in the south Solar allows you to go off grid what gives you an optimal cost/benefit ratio.
Statistics done the Forbes/troll way are just opinion making with no serious background.
Avalanche.
This is like arguing with flat Earthers. Free night time plans are available and daytime costs are upwards of 19 cents! Read my lips. There is no such thing as free.
The value of solar and wind decline in economic value as they become larger shares of the electricity grid for physical reasons. They produce too much energy when societies don’t need it and not enough energy when they do.
You can say exactly the same thing about having too much nuclear power. You cannot turn it off, so if you build too many nukes you have too much electricity at night. They are only good for baseline generation. The solution is not to build too many nukes. They are now 20% of U.S. capacity. Given nighttime demand I suppose 30% would be okay.
By the same token, you don't want to build more than ~30% of capacity from wind. In the south and southeast, solar produces the most electricity when demand peaks, because the biggest demand is from air conditioning. So I suppose 50% solar during daylight hours would not produce more power than you need.
Any type of generation has to meet constantly changing demand, from weather changes, factories turning on and off, and so on. Since wind and solar cannot be controlled, they must be augmented with natural gas, batteries, or hydro.
This problem is temporarily fixed through short-term (but still expensive) work-arounds — like California and Germany paying their neighbors to take their excess electricity.
There is no need for work-arounds. Just don't build more than 30% wind or 50% solar, as I said. That would be 80% peak capacity. The other 20% already comes from nukes, so on peak days you have nearly carbon-free electricity, except for augmentation by natural gas.
Read my lips. There is no such thing as free.
Read my lips: You do not as much as power company executives or the people at the EIA. The power company execs are building mostly wind and solar this year, because that is cheaper. The EIA and every other government and industry source says that wind and solar are much cheaper than other sources. You say they are all wrong. You say you know more than they do. You suffer from the Dunning Kruger effect. You are not some kind of lone genius with more knowledge of the electric power industry than everyone in the industry.
If this were an obscure subject, such as a particular cold fusion experiment that only a handful of people know about, then it would be possible for you to be a leading expert on the subject. But this is general knowledge of one of the biggest industries on earth. There is not the slightest chance you know more than the experts. It is as if you were telling us that electric cars use more primary energy than gasoline cars.
I’m not going personal Jed. A spirited debate is fine. Good night.
I’m not going personal Jed.
You are too going personal. You are claiming that you are a world-class genius who knows more than all the electric power experts tied together. You give ZERO evidence for your claim, other than your own ineffable, invisible genius. You expect us to believe you because you are you. That's personal.
A spirited debate is fine.
A debate must include some acknowledgment of established facts from authoritative industry sources. You cannot just make stuff up. That's not a debate.
This problem is temporarily fixed through short-term (but still expensive) work-arounds — like California and Germany paying their neighbors to take their excess electricity.
But the more solar and wind are added,
This author is telling us: If you do it wrong, it isn't right.
Add more solar and wind than you can sell and it costs you. Sure, and if you make 70% of capacity with nukes, that would also be too much. You couldn't sell it. It would not help to increase it up to 80%.
For that matter, if you added 200% of needed capacity with coal, that would cost too much. Making it 250% would not fix the problem. If you run a grocery store, and every day you have a lot of lettuce left over which you have to throw away, doubling your wholesale lettuce order will not make the problem better. It will make it worse. Building more wind or solar than you can sell is a stupid thing to do.
The whole argument is absurd.
This is like arguing with flat Earthers.
That would only be the case if the earth was actually flat, and every single geographer, geologist and map maker said it was flat, and you alone claimed it was round.
You are saying that everyone in the electric power industry is wrong. That makes you a flat-earther, not them.
They are only good for baseline generation. The solution is not to build too many nukes. They are now 20% of U.S. capacity. Given nighttime demand I suppose 30% would be okay.
My house had on of the 3000 10kW night current heatings used to "burn" down excess nuke current.
Now where almost everybody here has a ground probe and a heat pump we can make better use of this current. People are now obliged to removed them until 2025 some latest 2030.
We pay less than we used to? Texas is a leading state on windpower installations. From 2015 installed capacity doubled from 17GW to 36GW and In that same period prices increased dramatically from 9.5 cents to 14 cents per kWh, but somehow you say we are paying less?
Here in Ontario our electricity bills have risen enough to cause an uproar. But the increasing electricity rates are relatively modest :
What is not modest is what are called "Delivery Charges". Here in Toronto the Delivery Charges are about two times the cost of the electricity itself!
As an example, here is a portion of our latest electricity bill, for May.
(Perhaps to blunt the price increase shock, about two years ago Toronto hydro started billing customers monthly rather than quarterly.)
This is before a federal tax of about $9 and an "Ontario Electricity Rebate" of about $12. The latter was introduced because people were so outraged at their quickly rising bill that the government decided to give current payers a break and defer payment to the future (and incur debt).
I think it was Jed who said that energy companies are going wind and solar because they are cheaper. That may be part of it, but the reality is that wind projects are the ones getting the grants and the contracts to supply energy. So, it seems more a political decision than an economic one, at least here in Ontario.
For instance it is known that the Ontario government even a decade ago so favoured Wind power that it would pay wind power producers to *not* produce electricity when it wasn't needed.
That may be part of it, but the reality is that wind projects are the ones getting the grants and the contracts to supply energy.
Government support for fossil fuel far exceeds grants for wind and solar. Granted, much of that is for oil, which is not used for power generation.
(I think most of the support for wind, oil and other sources consists of tax breaks and depreciation. That was the situation years ago.)
Worldwide, fossil fuel subsidies are $9.2 trillion, which far exceeds support for alternative energy. Only $736 billion of that is a direct subsidy, but the rest is real and tilts the scales heavily in favor of fossil fuel.
Fossil Fuels Received $5.9 Trillion In Subsidies in 2020, Report Finds
For instance it is known that the Ontario government even a decade ago so favoured Wind power that it would pay wind power producers to *not* produce electricity when it wasn't needed.
If that is true, it is an example of what I described above:
If you run a grocery store, and every day you have a lot of lettuce left over which you have to throw away, doubling your wholesale lettuce order will not make the problem better. It will make it worse. Building more wind or solar than you can sell is a stupid thing to do.
It is not a mistake to sell lettuce, but do not try to sell more than the market wants.
The market for energy is ever changing. A surplus of wind power today might find a use tomorrow, for example by charging electric cars, or by encouraging night use after smart meters are installed.
Jed, professional debate and disagreement is an acceptable use of my time. In a capitalistic society giving something away for “free” is one of two possibilities, inefficiency (producing too much of something when it’s not needed), or it’s a marketing gimmick. Power companies invested in the wind power capacity and they can’t sell what it makes.
Here is a peer reviewed paper on the issue I am talking about: https://neon.energy/Hirth-2013…wer-Variability-Price.pdf
Also here is a Forbes article on the same subject. I guess I’m not the only genius who thinks like me…
Oh my the more I dig the more I can find credible experts in the field are screaming the same message:
I’m surprised you make such strong comments against my claims without first doing your research. If for no other reason, for your own credibility so you don’t look like another greenie hack.
You and the other energy journalists simply don’t understand the difference between cost and price and value. Intermittent sources of power create massive inefficiency. Yes this is a multi-trillion dollar scam being played. We add more and more solar and wind and then society pays more for their cheap electricity. Go figure.
The decreasing wholesale prices of electricity are not due to cheap power from wind. The following Laurence Berkeley Lab report shows that by far this was caused by the impact of cheap natural gas due to fracking.
All the while you make the logical fallacy of superior knowledge claims while not even having the intellectual honesty of researching my views and add a bunch of ironic claims of the Dunning Kruger effect and other over the top ad hominem attacks to the mix and to the objective observer made yourself look quite petulant. You are better than that Jed. Your contributions to this lenr field and your long history in reporting on it are legendary and I am but a tiny shadow in comparison. Don’t let your inherent bias belittle your respectable accomplishments.
Also here is a Forbes article on the same subject. I guess I’m not the only genius who thinks like me…
I already addressed that article. The author says:
"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."
The same thing can be said of any energy source that you build too much of. If you built nuclear plants to 70% of demand, you would waste a terrific amount of electricity at night. If you are a grocer and you order too much lettuce, you have to throw it away. That does not mean selling lettuce is a bad idea. It means you have to buy enough to satisfy market demand, and no more than that. Do not build more wind or solar than the market wants, or the technology can support. Anything you sell can be attractive in one amount, or a glut on the market in a larger amount.
"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."
Exactly the same thing goes for all other sources of energy. Nukes can go offline in SCRAM events at any time, taking out 1 GW of power. You have to have 1 GW of backup power to replace them. Wind turbines tend to fail in much smaller increments, 1 MW at a time. You can predict bad weather and not much wind a week ahead of time, whereas you cannot predict a SCRAM two minutes ahead of time. In that sense, wind is more reliable than nukes. Also, nukes are affected by the weather. They go down when a storm at sea clogs the input pipe with kelp, or when there is unusually cold weather in Texas.
The author does not understand the electric power industry. Or business 101.
So, it appears the best continuous source of electric power is hydro, as generators can easily be pulled off or on by shutting or opening valves. Ok, let's replace the old decaying steel dam from the copper mining days with a modern new one at the Salmon Trout River (sorry Seatrout, that's the name of the river.) and install a couple of generators. That would provide a nice balance for the 13 wind generators that have been proposed for the area. The stupid arguments that you people get into never cease to amaze me.
