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Wind and solar are cheaper than thought, admits UK government
- DrBazza 6y agoAre the UK govt 'admitting' something, or merely just stating results? 'admits' seems weird here.
- supermatt 6y agoThey have been asked for these figures to be published for years, and failed to do so. I suppose "admit" implies their reluctance.
- rjknight 6y ago_The first half of this section covers technology-specific changes to our assumptions. For offshore wind, onshore wind, solar PV, and Carbon Capture Usage and Storage technologies (CCUS), there have been significant updates, which we discuss below. We have also made minor changes to CCGT, tidal stream and AD assumptions._ I think "admits" is a reasonable term to use here, in the sense of acceptance or allowing the possibility. "Admit" is sometimes used to refer to an admission of guilt, or the admission of some secret that was previously denied, and that meaning would seem to be incorrect.
- sambe 6y agoBut that is by far the most common modern usage of the term. I would almost say the neutral usage is deprecated.
- rjknight 6y agoThe fun thing about language is that we can un-deprecate things just by deciding to do so!
- csours 6y agoI saw a headline that Keanu Reeves 'admitted' that he really wanted a role for something or other. I read 'admit' in headlines at about the same level as 'state' Wind and solar are cheaper than [previously] thought, states UK...
- plazmatic 6y agoDon't tell republicans this. Lol.
- ericvanular 6y agoThe true energy solution to climate change will need to be a mix of wind, solar, nuclear, storage, and more. No one generation method will solve all of our issues. We need to start being more technology agnostic (small plug for the https://collective.energy https://collective.energy community)
- dimitrios1 6y agoAlso small plug for the ACC -- American Conservation Coalition, a group of millennial conservatives. Whatever you may think of politics, you need support from both sides of the isle to get true change, and they genuinely believe in tackling the issue, but with market-based, evidence-based approaches.
- readams 6y agoYes the key thing to remember here is that without something to augment it, wind and solar get diminished returned as they become a higher percentage of your generation capacity. You need either nuclear or some heretofore not invented storage technology (or both) to get a reliable grid where wind and solar are a majority of your capacity.
- nkingsy 6y agoIt seems like we have endless ways to store energy at grid scale but we don't employ them because coal/natural gas is "cheaper" than storage, and likely will be until an industry for grid-scale storage starts grinding down costs (as opposed to piggybacking off of something maximized for power/weight like li-ion).
- ipnon 6y agoThe true energy solution to climate change is free markets. Fossil fuels are subsidized[1] and their externalities are untaxed.[2] Our society is structured to generate the suboptimal. This goes for pollution and price. [1] https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subsidies-a-closer-look-at-tax-breaks-and-societal-costs https://www.eesi.org/papers/view/fact-sheet-fossil-fuel-subs... [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2018/01/16/carbon-fees-mystery-untaxed-negative-externality/ https://cleantechnica.com/2018/01/16/carbon-fees-mystery-unt...
- m12k 6y agoI wonder if they were using numbers from the IEA? That agency seems to have been massively hit by regulatory capture by the fossil fuel industry, and consistently underestimates the price reductions of renewables year after year.
- adamcharnock 6y agoAbsolutely. Here is a chart illustrating this [1] (and its source [2]). I've seen a better version of this somewhere, but it's all I could find quickly. My interpretation of the chart is that the IEA's predictions for solar power growth have been very consistently delusional. [1] http://guensberg.at/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/weo2017_pv_EN-1.jpg http://guensberg.at/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/weo2017_pv_EN... [2] http://guensberg.at/how-the-transformative-trend-in-energy-systems-is-systematically-underestimated-an-analysis-of-the-iea-world-energy-outlook-2017/#prettyPhoto http://guensberg.at/how-the-transformative-trend-in-energy-s...
- newyankee 6y agotheir predictions are a joke and a 5 year old can extrapolate better if given the charts
- Zenst 6y agoSupply and demand - demand for wind and solar generation increased so production costs got cheaper. Now you just can't factor that kind of market shift into the numbers as easily as you can factor in costs increasing. So whilst we often see government projects overrun and cost more than initially calculated, it's good to see the opposite. I have read (sorry don't have link at hand) that some energy producers will end up paying the government due to reduced costs in production - so that'll balance things out and win win all around perhaps. OK dug out link - https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/offshore-wind-power-cheap-explained-pay-back-government-subsidies-563941 https://inews.co.uk/news/environment/offshore-wind-power-che...
- cbmuser 6y agoThat doesn’t change the fact that neither wind nor solar can produce electricity on demand. Unlike many other products, customers buy electricity when they need it, not when it’s cheap. It doesn’t really matter whether a wind farm in the German North Sea can produce a lot of electricity cheaply during a windy day when that electricity is needed three days later in Munich. This complete lack of matching supply and demand is what drives electricity prices with a large share of renewables in the market so high. In Germany, lots of electricity is produced from renewables at times when it’s not needed. This causes market prices to be negative at times and Germany is paying neighboring countries money to buy that excess electricity. At the same time, producers of renewables have guaranteed sales by German law, i.e. their electricity is always bought by the market whether it’s needed or not. It’s this gap between supply and demand that customers are paying for which drives German electricity prices. Currently, we’re paying 31 Euro cents in Germany per kWh while French customers whose grid has a large share of nuclear pay just 17 Euro cents per kWh on average. At the same time, the average CO2 emissions in Germany per kWh are at 400 grams in Germany while they’re only at 50 grams in France. That’s because whenever solar and wind aren’t delivering any electricity we’re starting up coal and gas plants. I wish proponents renewables were honest enough to not withhold these problems. I mean, absolutely no one argues that it’s not that expensive to build a wind or solar farm. What makes wind ans solar expensive is keeping the necessary backup plants in standby for when they’re not delivering and paying for getting rid of excess electricity from renewables when they’re not needed. The intermittency and low energy density are inherent physical properties of solar and wind farms which is why 100% renewables is newer feasible (unless for countries like Norway who have the possibility to build lots of hydro plants).
- chiefalchemist 6y agoThis helped to realize that our lens is a bit skewed. Oil and gas - _when compared with solar, wind, etc._ - aren't energy per se, they are batteries. The energy is stored and all we do is release it. On the other hand, wind and solar need to be created from scratch - and until we get better batteries - are released immediately. We're not usually comparing apples to apples but batteries (tradional energy sources) to from-scratch energy (solar and wind).
- siavosh 6y agoDoes northern Europe have enough reliable sunlight to make a dent in their energy needs?
- booboolayla 6y agoOf course they don't.
- baq 6y agoif it could store the gathered energy, yes... otherwise, winter is quite difficult; you'd have to overpanel probably something like 10x or more. the arctic circle still presents a problem.
- simlevesque 6y agothe thing with wind and solar is that you can build it fast. If you have a boom and you misplanned your energy requirements, or your governments wants to do green projects before the end of his term, solar and wind is the way to go.
- darrenoc 6y agoThis is a bit like when they cancelled the Rotherhithe walking & cycling bridge because it was allegedly going to cost 400 million. Powerful establishment lobbying groups ensure that government estimates for green projects make them seem unaffordable.
- inamberclad 6y agoWho the hell is lobbying against a pedestrian bridge?
- techdragon 6y agoBusinesses whose foot traffic would be adversely affected by the new pedestrian route is my first guess.
- westmeal 6y agoI can imagine an evil cabal of auto manufacturers but more realistically it's inflated construction contracts. Then again what do I know.
- mperham 6y agoI see you've never been to a City Council meeting. NIMBYs will screech about the most minor change.
- inamberclad 6y agoWithout idiots it wouldn't be a representational body...
- kmonsen 6y agoI see you are making sure that is the case for hacker news as well
- crusso 6y agoYeah, but they serve as a pretty good counter-balance to the over-zealous city council members who prefer to take on expensive pet projects rather than to competently manage existing infrastructure. It happens at all levels of government. I have an HOA that I've participated in over the years. My HOA's job is to maintain a clubhouse, the pool, the tennis courts, a small kids' playground, and some other common areas. For some reason, every 4 or 5 years, some person decides he wants to leave the traditional HOA lane and "go big" on special projects. Email flamewars and special HOA sessions ensue and "some person" gets the message to stop trying to find ways to increase our HOA dues.
- olivermarks 6y agoWe just had rolling power cuts at sundown during the height of summer in California, largely due to over reliance on solar power. We urgently need better energy storage technologies.
- olivermarks 6y agoCurious why this was down voted? Solar is now creating a lot of power in the sunbelt states but California has no way to harvest and store it for later use. Hawaii has a much more advanced approach on energy storage
- hinkley 6y agoI'm a little worried that home power conditioning is going to set up a much bigger class divide than in-home water purification does. If all the upper-middle-class people have Power Walls, local officials are going to care a lot less about brownouts.
- zaroth 6y agoThe amount that cost continues to decrease is almost mind boggling. The manufacturing learning curve is truly providing exponential returns for decades now. Seems like the comparison is unfair (or at least, overly simplistic) unless you include the cost of enough storage to provide supply more in the general shape as the demand curve. Solar is great by providing the most generation during peak hours, and wind is a great compliment in that generation slacks during the day when solar is at its strongest. Combined in theory they can do a decent job covering the demand curve, until you hit a stretch of calm or cloudy days... If you included 24 hours of storage in the LCOE then solar and wind probably stop looking quite so cheap. But if you ignore the biggest innate trade-off then they become the cheapest energy around.
- libertine 6y ago>The amount that cost continues to decrease is almost mind boggling. The manufacturing learning curve is truly providing exponential returns for decades now. The problem is that in some countries - I'll mention mine, Portugal - it does not reflect on the price sold to the consumer. So something isn't adding up, most of public entities (from government to regulators) brag and preach that we're reaching milestones, and claim prices keep decreasing, yet electricity prices keeps increasing/stays the same. Therefore I assume someone is taking the value out of it, because the consumer is definitely not, or make it clear that the costs will only ever reflect on production, because storage/distribution is what sets the prices to consumers, and those are increasing.
- 7952 6y agoRenewables are weird in that most of the cost is up front. So a developer goes into debt and then uses an agreed price to pay off that debt over the lifetime of the site. But the marginal cost of the power generated is very low. So effectively the public are paying the developers mortgage, but never get to own the asset they are funding.
- gwright 6y ago> If you included 24 hours of storage in the LCOE then solar and wind probably stop looking quite so cheap. But if you ignore the biggest innate trade-off then they become the cheapest energy around. But this is the basic disconnect in the way that renewables are discussed. You can't ignore the intermittent nature of the renewables, which means you need other power generation on the grid to make up the difference, which means you have to include the costs of the backup or storage system in your analysis. It is easy to make things look cheap if you pretend the expensive parts aren't needed.
- therealrootuser 6y agoMany have rightly brought up the issue of energy storage for solar. Could hydrogen fuel cells provide an answer here? I believe there is some fairly recent research describing efforts to use solar energy directly to produce hydrogen (as opposed to electrolysis). One could imagine a system in which solar cells produce hydrogen and the hydrogen is stored until needed or sold to industrial or retail customers. Interesting field to watch, I hope we'll see some neat progress in the coming years that combine developments from multiple areas of research.
- dexwiz 6y agoMost fields are now installed with a battery system on site. They are largely buried, so unless you watched construction, a field may have a large storage capacity without obvious infrastructure.
- glogla 6y agoUsing hydrogen as intermediate storage is interesting because it is a pattern that can be reused in many places. For example, I know of semi-experimental Chinese nuclear reactor that is used for making hydrogen rather than electricity. That could give you easily dispatchable nuclear power, which is much better, carbon-wise, than gas peakers would be. I don't know anything aboutthe efficiency and economics of such setup though. There's however a possible political trap to fall into - most of hydrogen humanity uses cones from oil processing. So going there has not obly geopolitical ramifications, but we might also end upin a place where we're greenwashing oil to "clean hydrogen".
- macspoofing 6y ago>One could imagine a system in which solar cells produce hydrogen and the hydrogen is stored until needed or sold to industrial or retail customers. You would need to massively over-provision your solar deployment because you not only need to produce enough energy for current needs, but also to produce enough spare hydrogen to bridge the intermittency gap ... and it is incredibly inefficient to produce hydrogen via solar-generated electricity. Worse than that, you need to over-provision not just for daily load (i.e. night and peak), but for seasonal (summer vs winter) and inter-seasonal variance. All this means you have huge amount of infrastructure that most of the time is doing nothing. I'm also not sure about the feasibility of using hydrogen as battery backup. Hydrogen is notoriously hard to handle, move and store - and the fact nobody is building out this infrastructure right now is probably indicative of this.
- LatteLazy 6y agoWe've decided to do nothing. Discussing the price of doing something is pointless.
- g8oz 6y agoSo 5.7 cents per kWh for offshore wind by 2025. Compare that to the Hinkley Point C nuclear project which will be 11.3 cents per kilowatt-hour (indexed against inflation). I'd prefer the former and use the savings to build out international HVDC connections to deal with intermittancy.
- robertofmoria 6y agoI want to know what "assumptions" are being made to denote pricing. If it assumes wind and solar can produce constantly and consistently that is wrong. The solar power suffers greatly from the fact that the panels need to be at a specific angle to the sun and that the highest production can only occur for maybe 6 hours of the day. I can already tell yhe lifetime use of both wind and solar are not calculated correctly. And as one person said wind and solar cannot produce on demand.
- crispyporkbites 6y agoAs our energy needs rise up, in the long run (100 years or more) solar will definitely be cheaper than any other form. It’s a giant nuclear reactor in the sky that’s beaming energy at us 24/7, all we have to is capture a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a % to fulfil all our needs in perpetuity. The sooner we stop setting fire to parts of our planet instead the better. I think this is something we will look back on and struggle to understand why we’re doing this now. The technology is there, and we’re over the tipping point now. It won’t be long till we create our first Dyson Sphere now, relative to human history.
- jordache 6y agostill too expensive in many cases. Putting solar on our house over 20yrs can reach an economic return of $10K. That is really weak value proposition, factoring in the work involved getting it installed and then uninstalled for roof work.
- haltingproblem 6y agoI briefly researched this and it sounds like accounting shenanigans but I am open being corrected. This analysis "Levelised cost of energy – A theoretical justification and critical assessment "[1] says that: "The weaknesses of the LCOE are found to centre on discount rate, inflation effects and the sensitivity of results to uncertainty in future commodity costs. These weaknesses are explored in the context of comparing combined cycle gas fired generation and offshore wind in the UK, based on publicly available cost measures. It is found that with variability of future fuel gas prices, and a Monte Carlo approach to modelling LCOE, the range of LCOE for CCGT is much broader in comparison to the LCOE of offshore wind. It is urged that explicit account be taken of the areas of weakness in future use of LCOE." Solar and Wind have high initial costs and lower operating (variable) costs. Since the variable costs around maintenance suddenly be slashed by 50% when they dont have inputs like fuel (coal, gas,...) I saw another article recently of how Wind was more expensive as the wind companies which were LLCs would go out of business and saddle the local government or state with the disposal costs for the useless windmills. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421518306645 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
- 8bitsrule 6y agoElectricity generated from the free 'fuel' of renewables costs nothing to mine, nothing to nothing to refine, very little to transport. In line with the laws of physics, 'cheaper' is the only possible conclusion. The 'on-demand' 24/7 part arrives once the reality-distortion field is dropped and we commit to solving the storage problem. Like turbines and panels, storage won't be up-front cheap, but done right it'll be amortized over centuries. The built-in fuel-cost savings will quickly pay for that ... and over that time the costs to humanity and to the planet will plummet. A no-brainer long-term investment.
- Proven 6y agoSo what, when they are not 24x7 so you still need to buy some other on top of that. The other thing is, after 10-20 years of burning taxpayer money on subsidies only now they "realize" how much stuff actually costs (and of course still get it wrong). Morons.
- amai 6y agoIt is also shown that wind and solar energy are much cheaper than nuclear energy. Nuclear energy: 102£/MWh Gas energy: 85£/MWh Offshore wind energy: 57£/MWh Onshore wind energy: 46£/MWh Solar energy: 44£/MWh