from Hacker News

Wind now competes with fossil fuels, and solar almost does

by joyce on 10/9/15, 12:09 AM with 174 comments

• by toomuchtodo on 10/9/15, 2:13 AM

  1. This is excellent. It means we're well on our way to sustainable energy generation. Wind and solar are only going to get cheaper. Even without subsidies, there is no reason to ever build another coal or oil fired generation facility. Natural gas will stick around until utility scale batteries ramp up, to where peaking plants are too expensive compared to utility scale batteries.

  2. Nuclear is dead. Very dead. Thorium. Fast breeder. Pebble bed. I don't care which you pick, no one is going to pour 10 years and $1-4 billion into a plant that won't be cost competitive when it turns up (maybe some governments, but you can't fix that; it'll just get mothballed).

  3. Utility scale batteries are going to be needed to make up for solar and wind's capacity factor (availability). Tesla is going to clean up with its Gigafactory. Well done Elon. I hope Mars treats you well.

  4. Any pollutants or negative externalities of both solar panel and battery production can be much better contained and managed than the output of a coal plant.

  5. Cheaper renewables means even cheaper power available for the transition to electric vehicles.

  6. First world demand for renewables will continue to drive down costs, allowing third world countries to piggyback off the cost savings. Remember how Africa leapfrogged with cell phones instead of land lines? Imagine battery packs and solar roofs in every home instead of traditional utilities. It's already feasible with current economics.

  Did I cover everything? Anything missing?

• by downandout on 10/9/15, 8:09 AM

  Wind and solar are still not competitive. The report says that coal costs $75 per megawatt hour, while land-based wind costs $83 and solar comes in at a whopping $122. That's far from "almost competitive". Also note that these are not costs of production, these are what people wind up paying for it. That means that the coal numbers include extensive taxes, while the solar and wind numbers include extensive tax discounts and incentives. This makes the real difference in production costs even bigger than what this report implies.

  If we as a society decide we want clean energy, that's fine, but it is important that people make these decisions based upon actual facts. Clean energy in 2015 is still significantly more expensive than energy produced using fossil fuels (and of course this report leaves nuclear out entirely, which is far cheaper than coal).

• by etrautmann on 10/9/15, 12:53 AM

  The frustrating part about this is that fossil fuels have had the scales tipped in their favor via 1) subsities, and 2) not accounting for externalities in the price. The economic costs of particular emissions, CO2, mercury, and other pollutants are very real, and astronomical, but a classic tragedy of the commons.

  If we factor those into the price, renewables like solar and wind would be much more competitive.

• by jweir on 10/9/15, 3:35 AM

  I wish there was a link to the article and sources on the prices.

  "while natural gas-based electricity cost $82 in North and South America."

  This makes no sense – the price of NG is very local.

  I just ran an analysis of NYISO Zone J (New York City's) average hourly price for the last year – and it comes out at an average of $40.87 per MWh(peak and off peak). This would include all sources of generation.

  The prices in the article would have everyone generating electricity loosing massive amounts of money – which they aren't.

  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mOm7bMQYJof7WDfqXmbA...

  You can find raw pricing data from the various US energy markets below – you'll have to dig a bit. This is price though, not cost.

  http://www.nyiso.com/ http://www.pjm.com/ http://www.ercot.com/ http://www.miso.com/ http://www.caiso.com/

• by maxharris on 10/9/15, 2:07 AM

  The article uses euphemisms and double-talk:

  As more countries and states enact market systems that put a price on carbon emissions, clean energy technologies will actually become cheaper than fossil fuel technologies

  Translated into plain English:

  As more governments raise the price of fossil fuels through increased taxation, solar and wind may cost less than fossil fuels.

  What does the author have to gain by obfuscating something so obvious?

  What is the impact on people when their energy costs are raised? (Hint: energy - vast amounts of it - goes into everything, from growing food to producing artificial heart valves.)

• by JulianMorrison on 10/9/15, 12:47 PM

  Wind may be cheap, but here in the UK a hostile government and NIMBYs have made it hard to open new wind-farms.

• by humbleMouse on 10/9/15, 1:24 PM

  Scaling of these solutions is what we need to worry about. Scaling wind and solar to actually provide energy on the scale we humans consume it is a totally different question that "how much does this cost per mega watt hour".

• by hugh4 on 10/9/15, 12:51 AM

  Using real money accounting or funny money accounting?