Posted on 04/24/2018 5:49:39 PM PDT by PROCON
Over the last year, the media have published story after story after story about the declining price of solar panels and wind turbines.
People who read these stories are understandably left with the impression that the more solar and wind energy we produce, the lower electricity prices will become.
And yet that’s not what’s happening. In fact, it’s the opposite.
Between 2009 and 2017, the price of solar panels per watt declined by 75 percent while the price of wind turbines per watt declined by 50 percent.
And yet — during the same period — the price of electricity in places that deployed significant quantities of renewables increased dramatically.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
And the media who scammed us with this renewable crap.
TANSTAAFL...
Those who curse God are surprised when His blessings don’t flow. Go figure.
The Bible puts it this way, the wisdom of men is foolishness to God.
The “progressives” have a reverse Midas touch, anything that is good, turns to manure when they touch it. Like Regan said, its not that Leftists don’t know anything, its just that so much that they know is wrong.
OK, translate :-)
Have a buddy with some solar panels on his place in Northern California, 95 hot and sunny in the very long summer - other than a couple of hours at high noon they don’t produce
Odd that.
My son lives in TExas and buys nothing but wind power. He also pays for a line charge.
Some months, the cost of his electric is $0. He only pays the line charge.
The power company (Exelon?) has shut in two coal-fired plants and a Nuke pant because they cannot sell the power as cheap as the wind farms.
( see https://www.publicpower.org/periodical/article/exelon-puts-texas-plants-totaling-3500-mw-bankruptcy)
Maybe it’s a Texas thing.
Which means......
The energy is free, but the cost of capturing and transforming it is not.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tanstaafl.asp
With the advent of very efficient LED lighting technology and nuclear batteries like the Toshiba 4S
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_4S
All you would need is some large underground used up salt mine that has has a constant “near room temperature” ambient temp.
The nuclear battery can provide cheap electrical energy for waste and water processing/reprocessing and the cheap LED lighting can provide energy to plant growing chambers.
These two techs can basically make underground settlements feasible and at some point to escape the tyranny of the socialist fools on the surface I can see people “grabbing a shovel” to escape the lunacy above.
I just want to get away from all these dumb liberal socialist schemes like global warming, renewable over subsidized crap...
A few points:
1. Wind stops blowing and sun doesn’t shine every single night. So you need the SAME CAPACITY conventional power plant backing the up! In other words you need to build TWICE the capacity as if you’d built a gas-fired or coal-fired plant alone. You simply cannot “dispatch” the power from wind and solar, so it takes TWICE the amount of capital and TWICE the number of plant operators. This doesn’t change even if you have large-scale energy storage systems - you need to first build the generation capacity and also build the storage capacity. You are still building TWICE the capacity you had to build if you used gas or coal alone.
2. Solar and Wind are highly distributed, low energy density generation technologies. They require MILES of transmission conductors not needed with central stations to collect the power from all over and deliver it to a major transmission line.
3. The amount of materials required to build wind turbines is vastly larger than the amount of materials needed to build conventional gas or coal fired power plants.
4. Wind turbines have switched to generators that use permanent magnets thus eliminating the need for gearboxes. But this means they consume HUGE amounts of very expensive rare earth elements which are used in small quantities in coal and gas fired power plants. High temperature turbines and boilers use large amounts of chromium, but it is not as scarce as the rare earths in high power magnets.
5. Wind and Solar are inherently very low-density energy sources unlike fossil fuels. It will take far more resources to deliver the same amount of energy from low-density sources than it does from high-energy-density sources like gas, oil and coal.
Wind and Solar will simply never be as economical as gas, oil and coal. Period. To think otherwise means you are smoking crack.
[ Have a buddy with some solar panels on his place in Northern California, 95 hot and sunny in the very long summer - other than a couple of hours at high noon they don’t produce ]
Solar only will work on large scale when you can point a solar array at the sun 24/7 .... the only place that can happen is in SPACE....
The only way to make it work is to setup robotic manufacturing on the moon to refine lunar soil to make solar cells then use a EM/Mass driver to deliver the manufactured cargo into orbit around the earth then beam the power back down to earth.
Until this is done, solar energy is always going to be unreliable and only for niche applications and never a backbone energy production method.
Your son is benefitting from cross-subsidies from people buying conventional power. The full economics of building conventional capacity to back up those windmills when the wind stops blowing are not built into the price of wind power.
Yes, people can save a lot of money by jumping on board. But the economics of the whole thing is horribly skewed by the public laws requiring utilities to sell renewable power.
I pay Ten Cents per Kilowatt hour. Let me know when Wind/Solar gets down to eight cents per kw/hr.
[ The energy is free, but the cost of capturing and transforming it is not.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tanstaafl.asp ]
If anyone ever creates a “ZPE” device they better not tell a soul but use this advice:
1. Setup a “Solar Farm” consisting of Solar panels that are “fake”
2. Put the ZPE device into the “DC/AC conversion shed”
3. Make enough money to slowly buy out an entire state’s energy utility companies and have them all running on ZPE.
4. THEN DISCLOSE as you hold the state’s energy hostage under threat of turning the entire region off, you demand to not be stopped from releasing how to make the device to everyone on the internet. Use the few billion you have to hire enough security to keep yourself alive.
* Read “Let there be light” by Heinlein.
Really? As an electrical contractor I’ve installed 1000’s of panels and watched them producing in the rain. Not sure what your buddy’s issue might be though.
A couple of thoughts. You can't form a reliable gird with PV and wind for reasons that are obvious. There are always fossil generators backing them up. That's a tidbit the greenies never like to mention.
Semi related is the stability of PV and wind. They produce ‘dirty’ power which has to be dealt with. Previously, grids didn't deal with it because it was such a small fraction and it could be accounted for.
Now the market/grids are correcting that issue (and others) with energy storage, ie batteries, and you need a lot of zeros to buy enough batteries to store even 1 MWH of energy.
I guess my point is that it's a complex topic. Pushing personal bias as the reason why things are the way they are, either for or against, is foolish.
Solar panel are so toxic to make they are no longer made in the USA. We have no problem though with poisoning the Chinese people to “be friends of the earth”
Work with a 30 y.o. guy from China who says he can’t go back to his village because of the pollution.
The environmental movement.... We use emotions over common sense!!! It’s what the globalist told us to do!!!!
Liberals are dumb. No other way to explain it. Same thing happening with cars. Too many electric cars so the tax revenue goes down so what are they going to do? Tax by the mile. That is coming to the 50 states within 5 years. I literally can’t stand liberals.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.