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.
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.
Wind and solar are subsidized by tax dollars. Because of this their bus bar cost is essentially zero. Stealing tax dollars is the only way they can be competitive.
Teans are making out like bandits on wind.
But nothing lasts forever, never mind the subsidies (can’t blame them for taking them- at least it nade sense there).
From the article:
“Hirth predicted that the economic value of wind on the European grid would decline 40 percent once it becomes 30 percent of electricity while the value of solar would drop by 50 percent when it got to just 15 percent.”
This because when the sun ahines, it shines everywhere. And the same for when it doesn’t. Ditto for wind.
That unreliability has an economic cost.
The low price of Natural gas probably made more of a difference in Texas. NG plants are a perfect match to wind and solar as they start up quick to make up low performance.
No doubt though, wind has been good for Texas. I think it’s about at 20% of their production so it still has a ways to grow.
Post #14 is spot on. Also, the price your son is credited per kw-hr is not the wholesale price that the utility would pay to purchase the electricity; it is the retail price the utility would sell it. So the utility can’t charge them for the backup capacity and is forced to pay too much. The deck is stacked.
Imagine that you owned a gas station and the state told you that not only do you have to sell gas but you have to buy the excess that others bring in — but not at a fair wholesale price, but the retail price. Not only would you soon be losing money but you’d be raising prices for all your other customers.
It is not a market solution and it’s only a good deal for the ones getting the mandated subsidies.