4 ms·
How long does it take for wind turbines to pay for itself?
by testmasterflex 4y ago
How long does it take for wind turbines to pay for itself?
- Y-bar 4y agoWind has some of the lowest levelized costs among all energy sources. There is a great link with breakdowns and charts at the Further Reading in the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#Further_reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source#... See "Lazard's Levelized Cost of Energy Analysis"
- bluedino 4y agoDoes this take into consideration the massive government subsidization
- justincormack 4y agoThere isn't massive government subsidization of wind power any more. It really is very cheap.
- Y-bar 4y agoIt has a headline named "Levelized Cost of Energy Comparison—Unsubsidized Analysis" on page 2 and I hope you can draw your own conclusions from that.
- cedilla 4y agoSubsidies for some wind energy farms in Germany are set by auction. They are now negative, i.e. developers pay for the privilege of building plants.
- gibolt 4y agoOil and gas are the only heavily subsidized energy sources. To the tune of multiple Trillions USD per year
- layer8 4y agoHere is a nice graph: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20201019_Levelized_Cost_of_Energy_(LCOE,_Lazard)_-_renewable_energy.svg#mw-jump-to-license https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20201019_Levelized...
- piokoch 4y agoWiki article is interesting, but it does not list two important cost elements. When there is no wind, we need some other source of energy (for now we don't have any practical energy storage - we don't have batteries and pump storage can work only if we have a big lake on the hill and the other at the bottom of it), this is also cost of having wind power plant. Since it is not easy to plan upfront when and how big energy deficit might happen, we need to purchase energy on request and this is expensive. There is also another problem: what if it is very windy and you can add that much energy to the grid? Easy, you just turn off some windmills, the problem is that wind power plants owners does not like that idea, so they also want money if production needs to be lowered beneath some level. Obviously there is some margin, nuclear/coal power plants have some means to slow/speed up electricity production, but only to some extent. The irony is that we have a energy source, which is "magic", it is clean, predictable, we know how to operate it - nuclear energy plants, but for some reason we are chasing some silver bullet with horrible energy density, that looks bad and is not reliable. If eco people were not fighting nuclear energy for last 50 years we would have been now in much better shape today. People who wanted to work on nuclear plants in the academia were treated like Holocaust deniers, so we have seen hardly any progress in the field for a long time, that's why we don't have any good way to handle nuclear wastes except storage (if they are radiating, there is energy there, why not to find a way to use it?).
- uniqueuid 4y agoDepends on whether you include the costs of funding a totalitarian state's war efforts in your calculation. In other words: Usually decades, faster with rising energy prices, even faster when accounting for externalities.
- blisterpeanuts 4y agoUnder such accounting, you would also need to avoid sourcing your blades and turbines from totalitarian China, which is emerging as the leading manufacturer.
- oneoff786 4y agoShrug. I’ll take Chinese turbines over Russian oil any day
- blisterpeanuts 4y agoSuppose China invades Taiwan. Suppose their turbines are assembled using slave labor. In my opinion, we need to incentivize China to clean up its act, not reward them for reprehensible behavior.
- uniqueuid 4y agoYes.
- AdrianB1 4y ago
- foepys 4y agoConsidering Russia's invasion of Ukraine: immediately.
- dzhiurgis 4y agoOffshore I heard it’s just a couple of years