Comparing Wind and Solar To Coal and Natural Gas
From the American Energy Society: Though impossible to forecast with certainty, wind and/or solar power will become more economical and more reliable than coal or natural gas when storage can hold four hours of capacity. That will allow renewable providers to sell power for about 3.5 cents per kWh.
Does anyone else find this a weird thing to say?
In the first place, you’re not going to find anything more reliable than fossil fuels, nor do you need to. Grid outages have nothing to do with the availability of coal or gas, nor with the power plants that consume them. Moreover, we have enough coal and gas to bake this planet like a huge spherical pizza hundreds of times over.
Also, storage capacity isn’t an issue; what matters is the cost of the storage capacity. To paraphrase 2GreenEnergy associate Dr. Peter Lilienthal, if you don’t care what you pay for storage, I’ll build you all the pumped hydro, compressed air, flywheels, or lithium ion battery systems you can imagine.
In addition, people are signing PPAs for wind at $0.025/KWh. Depending on supply and demand, wind is already far less expensive than coal. This means that no one is even considering building another coal plant, especially when the cost of carbon capture and sequestration is thrown in.
These guys are normally wonderful, but this is….weird.
Craig,
The cost of carbon capture and sequestration is about to undergo a dramatic revolution from an expensive overhead to a profit generating resource !
By 2020 the world will build more than 800 new Coal fired power plants, almost doubling the demand for coal. The next generation of Coal fired generation will be cleaner and more efficient, reducing the cost of power dramatically.
In the US, investment in coal is slowly resuming as the price of natural gas is beginning to rise due to the demand for LPG in Asia, and effects on investor confidence created by the Obama administration’s “War on Coal” wear off.
The transformation of the coal industry will rely heavily on new technology and new investor confidence to transform a former major polluter into an environmentally positive industry.
Solar, like Wind, generation will soon be forced to compete without government subsidies and a rigged marketplace. In some locales Solar and Wind will remain valuable contributors to the power mix, while in others the cost of storage, transmission, indeterminacy, maintenance and replacement etc will render these technologies uneconomic.
Craig,
The issue with storage changes based on the penetration of nuclear power and intermittent power compared to the penetration of load following power.
In SC – where I live – we have <<1% solar power penetration, ~57% nuclear power, ~2.2% hydroelectric, ~2.2% biomass and landfill gas… and the rest coal and natural gas.
The nuclear power is always-on. So that is ultimate baseload. It cannot follow load, it simply produces or it is taken offline for maintenance. The coal is largely baseload, with an 8-hour ramp-up and an 8-hour ramp down cycle. The natural gas is load following, with plenty of additional spinning reserves and plenty of spare capacity, and the hydroelectric has limited load following capacity: they can increase the flow through the turbines to a maximum point, or dial back the flow to a minimum required by the river ecosystem.
Right now, the baseload capacity in SC is pretty well maxed out. We have what we need, and export excess. Bringing in intermittent additional power off-peak (such as wind energy), might require power companies to switch more of their capacity from coal to natural gas, or might require more interconnection with North Carolina and Georgia so that we could export more off-peak power… but we could continue to build out intermittent peak energy (solar) as much as we want, because we are below FERC spinning capacity requirements in the summertime. So the intermittency of solar happens to align well with the actual need that the region faces. We'd be quite advantaged to build out as much as 5% solar power as fast as we could slap the panels into place. No thought of storage required. But offshore wind production will create strain and headache for the grid, because it's already over-producing at night, and the constant winds offshore would require the blades be pitched to curtail the generation until better storage comes available.
But for states that have very little baseload, or an excessive amount of hydropower… A state like Maine… that wouldn't be a factor even if they increased their wind penetration beyond 50%… They have enough hydropower and natural gas to balance the intermittency, and the RTO interconnection of ISONE would allow them to easily export excess production down to the ever-hungry NYISO markets.
It's state-by-state. There's no all-encompassing statement that could summarize this.
It's also shifting rapidly, with every coal plant decommission, there becomes more room in the grid for more intermittent power.
Craig,
The coal powered generation facilities being decommissioned are largely old, inefficient, small capacity units long overdue for replacement.
Nearly 60% of US coal fired plants are more than 46 years old, some 60 or even 70 !
Years of neglect and uncertainty in government policy and regulations, has contributed to a negative image for the coal industry, deterring investment in advanced coal fired technology.
A comprehensive analysis of almost 3,000 onshore wind turbines, and 1000 offshore selected globally, reveals the following alarming results.
1) On an average, onshore wind turbines generate electricity effectively for just 12 to 15 years, while offshore turbines need replacement after a mere 10 -14 years.
2) Prof Gordon Hughes, an economist at Edinburgh University and adviser to the World Bank, discovered the “load factor” (efficiency rating of a turbine based on the percentage of electricity it actually produces compared with its theoretical maximum) rapidly reduces from 24%t in the first 12 months of operation to just 11 per cent after 12 years.
3) Older Wind installations such Denmark and North Germany offshore production reduces from 39% to 15 % over 10 years.
4) The wind energy industry and Government agencies base all their calculations on turbines ,maintaining constant efficiency for at least 25 to 30 years !
5) Prof Hughes report was confirming and expanding on the findings of an earlier American study suppressed in 2015 by the US EPA. The EPA rejected the findings originally submitted to the DOE as “inconclusive”, ” negative” and “unsafe” after representations from the American Wind Energy Association and other RFA lobbyists.
Several of these public servants departed the EPA and other government agencies after the election of President Trump to take up employment in the Wind industry!
6) Prof Hughes submitted his report to an independent statistician at University College London who confirmed the findings.
In fairness, the report has been disputed by the wind farm industry, although not challenging accuracy or methodology of the report, but pointing out Wind Turbines will improve and the Wind industry will become more maintenance conscious.
It must be considered significant that so far not one large turbine manufacturer has disputed Professor Hughes findings.
Trillions of dollars has been invested by taxpayers on a global scale to support a technology produced by giant corporations who recklessly, (or knowingly), lied and colluded with government politicians and public servants to mislead and deceive taxpayers and consumers !
Two new studies are in progress to confirm Professor Hughes findings, and if those results are confirmed the leading Wind Power companies may find themselves in the same position as Volkswagen.