The Effect of Wind and Solar on Electricity Costs

I just received an email from the CO2 Coalition with a very revealing plot of the cost of electricity in many European countries versus the wind and solar capacity per capita for that country.  This plot is courtesy of Ken Gregory, the director of Friends of Science and a member of the CO2 Coalition.  I have had endless debates in the past trying to explain to intelligent people why the spot market cost for electricity generated by wind and solar is vastly lower than the real cost of electricity when these means of generation are added to the electric grid.  The costs of back-up dependable electricity generators, the additional transmission line costs, and the cost of additional control devices on the grid are simply beyond the comprehension of many "green" energy advocates.  The plot below makes it very clear that there are such effects that very much raise the cost of wind and solar electricity generation above the claim that it is nearly free!

This plot shows a very strong correlation of electricity cost to the extent of solar and wind generation on the electric grids of the countries of Europe.  This high degree of correlation certainly requires an effort to find an explanation that is not based on the reasons I offered above, if you are an advocate of "green" energy.  Understanding the basis for our energy costs is fundamental to a rational establishment of national energy policy.  That policy has a strong effect on the cost of living, the health of an economy, and the personal pursuit of happiness.

Bringing Britain's Energy Woes to America?

Bringing Britain’s woes to America?
 
Will Biden-AOC energy policies do to Americans what UK climate obsession is doing to Brits?
 
Paul Driessen
 
Virginia enacted a Clean Economy Act; other states have implemented similar laws. AOC demands a national Green New Deal; President Biden is imposing one via executive decree. The United Kingdom is determined to reach Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions; the European Union is pursuing a Green Deal.
 
All these policies send energy prices rocketing upward, eliminating jobs and killing people. Instead of reducing emissions, they simply move them overseas, where they combine with massive air and water pollution, habitat destruction and wildlife decimation – as China and other countries burn more coal, oil and gas every year, to improve their people’s living standards ... and to mine and process raw materials for the wind turbines, solar panels and battery modules they manufacture for climate-obsessed nations.
 
The net result: Progress toward global Net Zero is zero – worse than zero – and all the lost jobs, rising poverty, reduced living standards and policy-driven deaths are for nothing.
 
President Biden wants hydrocarbon-free electricity generation by 2035, and elimination of all fossil fuel extraction and use by 2050. That means no gasoline or diesel vehicles; no natural gas to power factories or heat, warm water and cook in homes, hospitals and businesses; no petrochemical feedstocks for fertilizers, plastics, pharmaceuticals and thousands of other essential, everyday products.
 
All US energy will be provided by wind, solar and battery power – millions of wind turbines, billions of solar panels and billions of battery modules, sprawling across continental United States and along its coasts. Petrochemicals will come from crops planted on millions of acres of former wildlife habitat.
 
To drive this extreme agenda, Team Biden has canceled pipelines, leases and permits; pressured banks to stop lending money for drilling; and issued scores of regulations that delay and drive up costs for fossil fuel projects – while making it easy for industrial-scale wind and solar installations to get permits. Prices for energy, transportation, food, services and used cars predictably shot up. Inflation and consumer prices reached 40-year highs.
 
Henry Hub natural gas prices doubled from $2.61 per mcf (thousand cubic feet or million BTUs) in November 2020 to $5.51 in October 2021, before falling to $4.75 in January 2022, as skyrocketing global prices spurred drilling, fracking and production on US state and private lands. Regular gasoline averaged $2.17 a gallon nationwide in 2020 – but hit $3.39/gal ($4.38 in California) in the same timeframe.
 
As Americans fret and fume over the needlessly high prices – and wonder what the future might hold – they can look to the UK and EU (a) to count their blessings for comparatively low prices today and (b) to ponder how continued climate-centric policies could impact American livelihoods and living standards.
 
Britain and continental Europe have already embraced a wind-and-solar future, closed coal and nuclear power plants, and banned fracking for the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas beneath their feet, while North Sea production keeps falling. They have reaped the whirlwind from those callously inept policies.
 
(It is illuminating and ironic that Russian organizations finance many US, UK and EU anti-fracking disinformation campaigns, funneling funds through a Bermuda law firm, a shell company and the Sea Change Foundation to the Sierra Club, Climate Action Network and other groups.)
 
Britain and Europe’s vaunted wind turbines have been generating electricity at a dismal 14% of “nameplate capacity” – providing power three hours a day, one day a week, four days a month, in short spurts, at completely unpredictable times. Their wintertime solar power has been equally sporadic and unpredictable. No modern society can function on such energy.
 
The huge gaps have been plugged with gas- and coal-fired generation, with much of the gas coming from Russia and the USA. But Asia also wants the gas, and Russia is playing Ukraine/Nord Stream 2 pipeline politics with its gas, tightening supplies as demand soars. UK and EU home and business gas and electricity prices are in the stratosphere – five to ten times the Biden Era prices Americans are paying.
 
Luckily for families and businesses, Britain’s Office of Gas & Electric Markets (Ofgem) regulates how much utility companies can charge. But that often means keeping household, hospital, school and business energy prices well below the utilities’ actual costs – with predictable results.
 
Experts say the average annual household bill of £1,277 ($1,755) could surge to £1,865 ($2,530) when the current price cap is raised in April 2022 – for homes and apartments that are much smaller than US counterparts, in a climate with much less extreme summer and winter temperatures than in much of the United States. Annual bills could exceed £2,000 ($2,715) or much more at Ofgem’s August review.
 
National Energy Action says this could put more than 6 million UK households (nearly one-fourth of all households) in “fuel poverty” – unable to afford proper heat, and often having to choose between heating or eating, even when cold indoor temperatures put their health and lives at risk.
 
For families that want budgetary certainty, the average 12-month fixed deal for a typical household now costs almost £2,500 ($3,430). But the UK’s second-biggest energy supplier’s most recent fixed-rate offer is almost £4,200 ($5,750)! That’s because natural gas and electricity generation costs are expected to keep rising – and because utilities must pay wind turbine operators “constraint payments” to turn turbines off whenever they generate more power than the grid needs and can absorb!
 
The month-ahead natural gas price at the Dutch TTF hub (a European benchmark for trading gas) recently hit €93.3 ($107) per megawatt-hour. That’s $31 an mcf – more than six times the January 2022 Henry Hub price. Just a month earlier, the European day-ahead gas price reached $61 per mcf!
 
No wonder 30 UK energy suppliers went bankrupt by the end of 2021 – leaving families and businesses scrambling to find new suppliers, at skyrocketing prices for heating and cooking. When utilities cannot charge customers anywhere near operating costs, they go belly-up.
 
No wonder two-thirds of UK renters struggle to pay their energy bills, and 400,000 more UK households were in danger of losing their gas and electricity provider before last Christmas. People are “genuinely terrified” about rising energy costs. Excess winter energy-poverty death tolls are likely to set new records.
 
Health and living standards in Britain and Europe will likely get far worse. In addition to insane energy costs, wages and environmental regulation costs are much higher than in Asia. Ceramic, steel, aluminum, automotive and other energy-intensive companies and industries are becoming uncompetitive. Manufacturing, jobs, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions are just moving to Asia.
 
Climate and energy politics, combined with fierce global demand, make it unlikely that Europe’s energy prices will go down. And while the EU recently voted to define natural gas and nuclear power as “sustainable,” acquiring affordable gas and building new nuclear plants will take years and be battled every step of the way. Rolling blackouts could become as common as in California.
 
British politicians “rail at energy costs” and argue about trimming them at the margins, says journalist Madeline Grant, perhaps by reducing the 5% VAT on energy or the 25% green-social subsidy levies on electricity bills. But they “dare not question the green policies” that cause energy price increases, end up taking no action, and then slap hefty new “pollution taxes” on gas and diesel vehicles.
 
Britain and Europe need to drill and frack their vast shale deposits. Having shut down their older nuclear plants, they must start building small modular reactors. The rest of the developed world needs to take similar actions – and not only because China, India and the rest of the developing world are not about to give up fossil fuels and rely on unreliable wind and solar power, but to save jobs and lives.
 
Otherwise, Britain’s Christmas just past will be its, Europe’s and America’s Christmas future, forever. Scrooge learned from Marley. Will Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, AOC and their lot learn from reality?
 

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues. 

Charles' Comment:  There seems to be no end to the destruction of lives and society that radical environmentalists and the believers in the false catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis work with so much dedication to accomplish!

Comments on Random Subjects

Iran spends about $1 billion a year to fund terrorism, making it the number 1 funding source for terrorists.

In October, there were only 3% of Americans who did not have a job and wanted a job.  This is the lowest percentage since this statistic has been determined starting in 1994.

PG&E has cut off power in large areas of California due to high winds and claims that the damage of falling trees and limbs to their power lines and equipment can start fires.  A good part of this problem is because PG&E has put so much money into other tasks dictated by the socialist government of California instead of removing trees from the vicinity of their power lines and updating their essential distribution equipment.

Wind and solar power account for about 17.9% of all electric power generation in California now. Wind generators, which operate in the wind speed range from 6 or 7 mph to about 55 mph.  A wind speed of about 30 mph is usually the optimum power generation wind speed.  The high winds that are driving the California wildfires are also causing shut-downs of wind generators or causing them to operate at higher than optimum power generation speeds.  This may well be causing the wind generator portion of the California electricity supply to be under-performing.  To be sure, under-performing wind generation is a common problem with this intermittent, unreliable power source.

Simple Illustration of the Limits of Alternative Power for the Electric Grid

The Institute for Energy Research has just put out a new report: Assessing Emerging Policy Threats to the U. S. Power Grid by Travis Fisher.  There are two graphs that quickly illustrate some of the critical limits on using solar and wind power generation on the electric power grid.  The first important plot is the daily average power output of the alternative energy sources:

Here one can easily see that the average daily output of electric power generated by solar power is a very small fraction of its peak output at the time of day when the electric power need is at its peak, namely at 5:53 PM.  This plot makes it hard to see whether wind power generation is a good actor.  With wind the time of day average is more of a problem than the above graph makes it appear and the time of year average changes are even worse.  To see this, examine the plot below:

This graph shows that the summer electric power usage greatly exceeds the average annual electric power usage for all hours of the day as shown in the black solid and dashed curves, respectively.  The red dashed curve shows the average annual wind generation percentage by hour of the day.  It has a minimum when the average annual power need has a maximum.  This problem is greatly increased in the summer months because except for a few hours in the night, summer wind power generation is less than the annual average.  That decrease relative to the annual average is the most dramatic during the peak electric power usage hours of the day.  Thus the seasonal peak load is in the summer, while the seasonal minimum in wind availability is also in the summer, creating a catastrophic disconnect.

We must not also forget that there are large variations in the availability of wind at any time of the year.  Wind speeds are often below their average or at speeds in excess of those for safe operation of a wind generator.  As for solar, well cloud cover is highly variable.  These are inherently very unreliable sources of energy.

The technology to store massive amounts of power from solar energy and wind generation inexpensively through the daily cycle for use when needed does not exist.  Of course then it also does not exist to deal with the seasonal changes in electric power use and generation by solar or wind as well.

This will never stop the green socialists from insisting that we stop using reliable and inexpensive fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas, which we have in abundance in the U.S.  No, they are very willing to proceed with the destruction of a vital source of our standard of living.  It must be because they wish to condemn mankind to a hell on Earth because their religion holds man to be the murderer of Mother Nature.  No matter how long the surface temperature of the Earth fails to rise in accord with their climate computer models, they will not admit to the failure of their alarmist belief in the claim of catastrophic man-made global warming.  That claim is just too useful to their need for more political power and control of the lives of the People.  It does not matter either that they have no practical alternative source of power for the fossil fuels for which they have an unreasoning hatred.