Archives par mot-clé : Renewable

better to know...?, energy and fields

How Wind And Solar Sent Energy Prices Sky-High in ‘Green’ Countries

by B. Lomborg, May 8, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch 

Ask families in Germany and the UK what happens when more and more supposedly “cheap” solar and wind power is added to the national power mix, and they can tell you by looking at their utility bills: It gets far more expensive. [emphasis, links added]

The idea that power should get cheaper as we get more green energy is only true if we exclusively use electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing.

But modern societies need power around the clock. When there is no sun and wind, green energy needs plenty of backup, often powered by fossil fuels. What this means is that we pay for not one but two power systems.

And as the backup fossil fuel power sources are used less, they need to earn their capital costs back in fewer hours, leading to even more expensive power.

This means the real energy costs of solar and wind are far higher.

One study looking at China showed that the real cost of solar power on average turns out to be twice as high as coal, while a peer-reviewed study of Germany and Texas shows solar and wind are many times more expensive than fossil fuels.

Germany and the UK now have so much “low-cost” solar and wind that their electricity costs have become among the world’s most expensive.

The latest data from the International Energy Agency make it clear that there is a strong and clear correlation between more solar and wind and much higher average energy prices for households and industries.

In a country with little or no solar and wind, the average electricity cost is a bit over 11¢ per kilowatt-hour.

For every 10 percentage points of solar and wind, the cost increases by more than 4¢. The results are nearly similar for 2019, before any impacts of COVID and the Ukraine war.

Look at Germany, where 34¢ per kWh is more than twice the US cost and nearly four times the Chinese price.

Countries that use a higher percentage of solar and wind power tend to have higher energy prices per household. Mike Guillen/NY Post Design

Germany has installed so much solar and wind that, at full capacity, it could produce two times Germany’s electricity demand.

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energy and fields

Wake Physics: Large Wind Farms Are Making Downstream Turbines Unprofitable

by P. Gosselin, Apr 20, 2025 in NoTricksZone 

A virtual wake-up call for the wind power industry. Two companies are sounding the alarm as they risk losing a lot of money.

Although they are not making losses yet, they are earning less. It’s about the the wake effect on wind farms by other wind farms.

Windmesse.de

The expansion of offshore wind energy in the North Sea is a central component of the European energy transition. However, two of the biggest players in the industry are now warning of negative effects: Ørsted and Equinor have jointly calculated that the planned 1.5 gigawatt wind farm ‘Outer Dowsing’ could cause significant so-called wake losses. These are yield losses that occur when the wind is weakened by upstream wind farms, causing downstream turbines to produce less electricity.

The two companies estimate that their existing wind farm projects in the British part of the North Sea could lose up to 361 million pounds – the equivalent of around 422 million euros – in the long term as a result of the new wind farm. The wind farms already in operation, which are dependent on constant wind conditions in order to achieve their planned output and ensure profitability, will be particularly affected.”

The phenomenon is called the wake effect and it is by no means new, as you can see in the Sciencemediacenter, an article from 2012:

The existence of wind turbine wakes has been known for decades. For smaller wind turbines and onshore wind farms, it for a long time was not considered to be so important. With the increasing size of individual wind turbines (multi-MW turbines) and larger wind farms in recent years, the size and length of the wakes are increasing and becoming increasingly relevant. I pointed this out back in 2010 and developed a simple model that can be used to estimate the length of wind farm wakes. This model shows the dependence of the length of wakes on subsurface roughness and thermal stratification of the air. Wakes of tens of kilometers in length can be predicted for offshore wind farms with stable stratification. Ms. Lundquist’s working group already presented simulation results with the WRF flow model in 2012, some of which show even longer wakes.“

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better to know...?, energy and fields

Tech Giants quietly drop renewables and sign pledge to triple Nuclear Power

by Jo Nova, Mar 14, 2025

Renewables are so over

Just like that — the renewables bubble went phht.

After twenty years of hailing wind and solar, suddenly the world’s tech giants are cheering for nuclear power. Worse —  they don’t even mention the words carbon, low emissions or CO2. The new buzzwords are “safe, clean and firm“. They talk about needing energy “round the clock”, and they talk about “energy resilience” — but they don’t saynuclear is “low emissions”. It’s like they want everyone to forget their activism. Did someone say something about climate change?

Meta, Amazon, and Google have flipped like a school of barracuda. Five minutes ago, life on Earth depended on achieving Net-Zero with fleets of wind farms in the sunset, now, they just want energy and lots of it. The big tech fish and their friends have signed a Large Energy Users Pledge admitting that the demand for energy is rising rapidly, that nuclear should triple by 2050 and that large energy users depend on the availability of abundant cheap energy (Small energy users too,  Mr Bezos-Zuckerburg-Pichai.) The closest they come to hinting at the ghost of renewables is when they say they want energy that’s not dependent on “the weather, the season, or the geographical location”.

There’s no “Sorry we got it wrong”. There’s no apology for hectoring us, censoring us, or wasting billions of dollars. It’s just Mr Don’t-Look-Over-Here telling us what most engineers knew for 30 years. This is the billionaire club asking the taxpayers to build them more nuclear plants.

Signatories include Siemens Energy, which suffered a 36% share price fall 18 months ago when it admitted it was losing billions trying to maintain wind turbines.

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better to know...?, energy and fields

Peer-Reviewed Study Confirms Wind And Solar Are Far Costlier Than Coal, Natural Gas

by J. Taylor, Mar 4, 2025 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Renewable power advocates often claim wind and solar are less expensive energy sources than coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. [emphasis, links added]

Such a claim begs the question of why the heavily subsidized Ivanpah solar power facility is going out of business, following a long line of other renewable energy project bankruptcies.

Also, why would most of the world continue to build coal power plants if it is more expensive than wind and solar? The answer is wind and solar are expensive, financial losers. A recent peer-reviewed analysis proves that point.

A recent study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Energy, reports on the full-system levelized cost of electricity generation. The term “full system” is key.

Many entities have assessed what it costs utilities to purchase or produce electricity from existing sources and deliver it to customers.

These cost assessments, however, ignore the intermittency of wind and solar and how intermittency adds substantial costs to the entire electric grid.

The cost assessments also fail to account for how wind and solar projects cannot be built just anywhere and often require new, long, expensive, and inefficient transformation lines to deliver power from the generation locations to consumers. This also adds substantial costs to the overall electric grid.

The peer-reviewed Energy study analyzes these factors and presents an apples-to-apples cost comparison of the full-system cost of wind, solar, coal, natural gas, and nuclear power.

The verdict is devastating to wind and solar power and explains why most of the world prefers to build coal and natural gas power plants.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Habitat Destruction Offsets for “Renewables” are just Indulgences

by D. Wojick, Dec 28, 2024 in WUWT

A bad idea is emerging in the “renewables” world, namely that projects can buy their way out of destroying natural habitats. The wind and solar projects still destroy the natural habitats they are built on but they fund a magic wand that somehow supposedly creates new compensating habitat someplace else. Not really.

The fallacy here is that every acre in America already has a habitat. You can change an acre’s habitat from one form to another but not create one. It is a zero sum game.

There is a long standing, highly specialized development offset program that helps make the point. This is wetlands protection under section 404 of the Clean Water Act. Wetlands are deemed to be so special that filling one in for development can be offset by creating one someplace else.

But if you convert dry land to wetland you have destroyed the dry land habitat. So the amount of habitat destruction is not reduced, just the amount of wetland destruction.

The supposed renewables habitat destruction offset does nothing like the 404 program. The renewables developer simply pays to have habitat created someplace else which is impossible. For reference these programs are often called Biodiversity Offsetting which sounds nice.

Such a program might create habitat somewhere that matches that destroyed by the renewables project but that requires destroying the present habitat of the offset site. For example creating a woodland by destroying a grassland. Or vice versa, bulldozing a forest to create a grassland. This might even mean destroying farmland.

Clearly this is nonsense. It is a form of indulgences, which means paying for sin, in this case the sin of habitat destruction. Because solar and wind certainly destroy the habitat they are developed on.

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better to know...?, energy and fields

Germany’s Compounding Energy Woes: Even Wind Power Industry Is “Sliding Into Crisis”

by P. Gosselin, Nov 15, 2022 in NoTricksZone

Germany’s Blackout News here reports that not only is Germany’s energy supply faltering profoundly, but so is its wind industry as well, reporting  that it is “sliding into a crisis”.

Gloomy outlook also for Germany’s wind energy industry. Photo by P. Gosselin

Wind energy is supposed to step in and play a key role in supplying Germany with energy as other sources get cut off. But that too is not going to plan.

“Nordex is closing its plant in Rostock, Siemens Gamesa is sliding deep into the red and at Vestas the workforce is on strike,” reports Blackout News.

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energy and fields

The renewable energy policy Paradox

by J. Blazquez et al., Feb 2018 in ScienceDirect

Abstract

One major avenue for policymakers to meet climate targets is by decarbonizing the power sector, one component of which is raising the share of renewable energy sources (renewables) in electricity generation.

However, promoting renewables –in liberalized power markets– creates a paradox in that successful penetration of renewables could fall victim to its own success. With the current market architecture, future deployment of renewable energy will necessarily be more costly and less scalable. Moreover, transition towards a full 100% renewable electricity sector is unattainable. Paradoxically, in order for renewable technologies to continue growing their market share, they need to co-exist with fossil fuel technologies. Ignoring these findings can slow adoption and increase the costs of deploying new renewable technologies.

This paper spots the incompatibility between electricity liberalization and renewable policy, regardless of the country, location or renewable technologies. The Paradox holds as long as market clear prices with short term marginal costs, and renewable technology’s marginal cost is close to zero and not dispatchable.

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better to know...?, renewable energy

Wind Industry Faces Billions In Early Repair Costs

by Benny Peiser, February 23, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch

Ørsted must repair up to 2,000 wind turbine blades because the leading edge of the blades has become worn down after just a few years at sea.

Siemens Gamesa also does not want to comment on the costs, but the company’s Danish subsidiary has just provided 4.5 billion Danish Krone ($750 million) or 16% of its revenue to guarantee its commitments (…)

better to know...?, renewable energy

New York Times: World’s nations building huge numbers of new coal plants despite emissions growth

by  NY Times, July 13, 2017 in WUWT

The level of renewable use is now so high in Germany that serious electric grid reliability and stability issues now exist which require both fossil power plant emergency backup for failed renewable production and dictate rejecting renewable energy to ensure operation of fossil plants required for electric grid reliability and stability.