If Solar and Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive? | Hacker News Reader

If Solar and Wind Are So Cheap, Why Are They Making Electricity So Expensive?

wattsupwiththat.com

9 pointsvixen997 comments

This site is focused on denying anthropogenic climate change:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Up_With_That?

The man who runs it is a former television meteorologist. The Wikipedia page on him says he attended electrical engineering and meteorology classes at Purdue University, but did not graduate or receive a degree.

So? You did not address the argument or the information presented, but rather went straight to attacking the messenger. Seems to me that the central thesis that renewables are increasing electricity costs even as main-stream journalists report that renewables are now getting cheaper than non-renewables and commonly say things like "we are reaching a point where the new energy technologies are going to be cheap enough to drive a lot of the old coal-burning power plants off the market" is correct -- or at least I haven't seen evidence to the contrary.

Tesla Powerwall & Commercial Powerpacks are designed to solve this kind of issues, which is coined "Duck Curve"[1]

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2016/2/10/10960848/solar-energy-duck-cur...

I've noticed that on our electric bills, the utility separates the energy charge and the delivery charge--and the delivery charge is often more than the actual cost of the electricity.

So the middle man is eating the profit. Nice!

They're not, and this site is a very well known ideological rag.

Many power bills give you a cost breakdown. Where I live delivery charge is more than the cost of the electricity itself, which is not terribly surprising given the massive capital cost of the power grid.

This is also probably amplified by the fact that California (where I live) imports a ton of power from states as far away as Oregon, Washington, and Utah. That's not because of solar and wind but because California does not have adequate storage and/or other forms of generation capability to service its demand. More solar and wind or anything else for that matter would probably help the situation by reducing the amount of imported power.

This is also not horribly surprising though. It's the most populous state and is surrounded by lots of much less populous states with abundant natural resources. So it's not surprising that California would import a lot of energy. Electricity is nearly always more expensive in places with higher population density due to the mismatch between supply and demand in those places, requiring more energy to be imported over longer distances. Whether it's moved as electricity over wires or as fuel there's always a transport cost. So some of Cali's costs are bad policy but some is just physics and economics.

The cheapest power tends to be in places with loads of local energy resources and lower population density (matched supply and demand). Examples are the Pacific Northwest with tons of local hydro or Appalachia with loads of coal and gas right there.

Given the overt bias of this site I'm guessing their solution would be to burn coal in California, but that coal would have to be transported thousands of miles because Cali doesn't have coal.

This is a good argument for constant high capacity renewables like OTEC

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