This approximate chart shows Standard & Poor’s Assessment of Electrical Generation Costs. S&P notes that there are disadvantages with wind that are not explicitly modeled – high transmission costs (because wind has limited availability), low capacity factor (3035%), and unpredictability (leading to greater need for back/up power) and limit wind from serving as a baseload power source. Solar prices are an average of Khosla Ventures estimates. Solar suffers from similar unpredictability problems as wind. Thorium prices are DBI estimates. Price includes capital, running and CO2 capture costs. Solar prices are dropping, fossil fuel prices are growing and nuclear costs are generally stable.
How is coal more expensive than wind?
Wind price shown here is an average. It can be significantly more expensive or less depending on the location, scale and setup. But it doesn't really matter, as it can only be a secondary source of energy until we have some sort of really effective energy storage solution right?
Problem with wind is its power density, which is so poor as to make it an absurd waste of land/sea, resources & transmission loss. Great for the few. subsidized investors though!
Some good refs are MacKay's "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air", or Etheridge's "The Wind Farm Scam".
Thanks for the reading suggestions.
Coal vs wind? These comparisons are always flawed, because all combustion power gets subsidies, exemptions, etc. The NORM exemption, for example, allows combustion plants to emit about 100x the radioactivity than any nuke can, and there's good Uranium content in coal ash. Coal, in particular, is allowed to kill >12,000 of us per year via its emissions alone.
Wind sucks up land/sea and about 700 tons of material per MW installed -- iron ore, coal, steel, limestone, aggregate, concrete -- all produced using fossil fuels.
Since wind's power density is much less than local solar's, and solar efficiency has one or two doublings to go, there's really no reason for windmills, wave machines... at all.
I thought that Ontario was making a feed-in-tariffs for wind selling it at roughly 19cents/kWh in order to make it possible to pay off the turbines in their 30-year lifetime. Less than 7.5 cents seems rather low.
My bad, it's 13 cents. http://fit.powerauthority.on.ca/sites/default/files/FIT%20Price%20Schedu...
I could have sworn they had a higher price for off-shore wind any how.
In order to incentivise roof-top solar they had to put on a 63-cent FIT in order for people to invest in it.
Yes, that's correct. I'm thinking of getting it as I live in Ontario, but it's not really a good solution, because you see my neighbours are paying taxes for my installation basically. It's good on an individual level, but it doesn't solve the energy problems. Still it may be a good idea to get it installed to encourage the solar research. If there is a bigger market for solar panels it will drive the prices down which will make solar make more and more sense.
But, if the panels are reasonably efficient, say >15%, it's a benefit to all. Aren't there "no-money-down" programs up there, as we have in the US?
By the way, here's what a sizable church in Calif. can do most every day...
http://tinyurl.com/3znad4b
Yes, there are. Grasshopper Solar just approved my application. Will be interesting to see how it goes.
Excellent! See if they have a web address for monitoring it too.
So you will concede that the figures in that chart are completely off the mark?
It could be. I didn't do the research myself.
