MSimon wrote:The subsidies are still less than the cost of the equivalent capacity in coal-fired new construction, which would have a useful service life extending as far out as 2070. (10 years to permit & finance, plus 50 year op life).
Is that less per KWH? Or just less total.
BTW is the cost of 100% backup for AE accounted for in your numbers?
i.e. for 1,000 MW net generating capacity you have to pay for the AE plus the cost of 1,000 MW of actual (coal, nuclear, nat. gas) generating capacity.
A report I blogged a few months back said that getting AE up to 10% (IIRC could have been 20%) of grid power only cut CO2 emissions by 2.5%.
And of course that does not account for grid stability issues once AE goes above 20% of grid power - i.e. clouds on solar and sudden drops of wind.
BTW I used to be a big proponent of wind. As I have gotten deeper into it I have soured considerably.
To be competitive wind + storage has to get below $1 a watt. Right now wind (at 33% capacity factor) + backup generation is around $4 to $5 a delivered watt capital cost + the cost of fuel for the backup. And it has to be hot backup because wind/solar output can decline drastically in seconds. Normal dispatch is in 15 minute increments.
And if AE is so great why have Germany, France, and Spain cut subsidies to zero? I think given the cost of power generated a loss of 2 jobs for every job created is credible.
I'm hedging my aneutronic bets by writing a free special report about what can be done with today's off-the-shelf hardware by a more or less average homeowner with "only" $1k to invest in creating an energy cost reduction snowball that finances further additions of collection, storage, and inverter capacity. Only the export power inverter is a grid-tie, btw.
My system plan integrates a household's
entire energy budget, including the car(s) and heating. It uses wind's contributions to the battery bank as welcome surprises which may eventually become predictable due to the installation's historic data. Solar is somewhat easier to accurately predict and quantify in the design phase. Wind is included because of it's ability to extend the collection window beyond sunny weather, but does not envision a 10m mast mount.
Given the 40 and 50 year projected service lives of solar and commercial steam cycle plants, building 1GW of commercial capacity represents an enormous ongoing commitment to buying and cleaning up after the fuel of choice. Read scrubbers, etc.
This fuel bill, coupled with the unionized maintenance labor and an energy inefficient design, should produce a decidedly lopsided TCO/watt advantage for an integrated system design.
The biggest flaw that I've seen is that Sid Solar wants to sell electric roofs. Willy Wind wants to sell 10m high windmills. Sounds like I'll need to pay an ME and a crane service. This does not bode well for periodic maintenance....
The inverter builders respond to these market conditions by producing grid-tie inverters in the 5-10kW range.
So we have to make dead sure we're comparing apples to apples...