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That is not accurate. It does not make financial sense to use renewables versus natural gas for electricity generation. Here's the data: https://www.eia.gov/for

That is not accurate. It does not make financial sense to use renewables versus natural gas for electricity generation. Here's the data: https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.pdf https://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation... Note the report has an important caveat. "The LCOE values for dispatchable and nondispatchable technologies are listed separately in the tables, because caution should be used when comparing them to one another." The reason is that wind and solar are dependent on the weather and the position of the sun. It does not matter how cheap something is if it can't keep the lights on. Wind and solar might seem close in price to nat gas electricity generation, but in reality they need to be much cheaper because there is not such thing as an electricity grid run on wind and solar alone. There is only wind and solar + natural gas for when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

diafygi 10y ago
It's half accurate. The investment firm Lazard has a nice report[1] on comparing U.S. energy costs by source. Here's the costs in the U.S. (without counting subsidies): * Wind: $ 32/MWh * Solar: $ 43/MWh * Natural Gas: $ 52/MWh * Coal: $ 65/MWh * Geothermal: $ 82/MWh * Biomass: $ 82/MWh * Nuclear: $ 97/MWh * Solar+Storage: $ 119/MWh * Diesel: $ 212/MWh Also, and you can get to about 50% penetration of non-dispatchable sources before you have to start adding storage[2]. So renewables are currently cheaper than natural gas for half the electricity, then more expensive for the other half. As storage gets cheaper and the likelyhood of a carbon tax increases, the expectation is that renewables + storage will likely get cheaper than natural gas in the next 5 years or sooner[3]. So, the claim is half accurate in theory, but actually fully accurate in practice since by the time we reach 50% renewable penetration, storage will be by far cheap enough to take up the other half. [1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-... [2]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc_2013.pdf https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc... [3]: http://powerledger.io/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-cheaper-grid-2017-2/ http://powerledger.io/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-c...

diafygi 10y ago

It's half accurate. The investment firm Lazard has a nice report[1] on comparing U.S. energy costs by source. Here's the costs in the U.S. (without counting subsidies): * Wind: $ 32/MWh * Solar: $ 43/MWh * Natural Gas: $ 52/MWh * Coal: $ 65/MWh * Geothermal: $ 82/MWh * Biomass: $ 82/MWh * Nuclear: $ 97/MWh * Solar+Storage: $ 119/MWh * Diesel: $ 212/MWh Also, and you can get to about 50% penetration of non-dispatchable sources before you have to start adding storage[2]. So renewables are currently cheaper than natural gas for half the electricity, then more expensive for the other half. As storage gets cheaper and the likelyhood of a carbon tax increases, the expectation is that renewables + storage will likely get cheaper than natural gas in the next 5 years or sooner[3]. So, the claim is half accurate in theory, but actually fully accurate in practice since by the time we reach 50% renewable penetration, storage will be by far cheap enough to take up the other half. [1]: https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-energy-analysis-90.pdf https://www.lazard.com/media/2390/lazards-levelized-cost-of-... [2]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc_2013.pdf https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~vsmith/docs/renewables_sgc... [3]: http://powerledger.io/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-cheaper-grid-2017-2/ http://powerledger.io/energy-disruption-solar-plus-storage-c...