Dunkirk auction result boosts the case for offshore wind energy in France

Certainly does... and don't forget that we are tied into paying that price for the life of the plant. And then on the hook for the decommissioning costs and storage of the waste. And are basically paying for much of the development cost, and providing a low interest loan...

I cannot wait until storage options work financially and the case for coal, gas and nuclear is a moot point as the costs of renewables are so low.

Yep, just don't count your chickens before they hatch. That was the bid price but it remains to be seen if they can deliver at that price point.

You're comparing the price of an energy that is non-drivable (wind) to one that is (nuclear).

Non-drivable energy sources cannot stand on their own. People also want electricity in the evening when there's not enough wind or on a cloudy day.

The fact that the energy produced is not drivable must be factored in the €/MWh otherwise you're comparing apples to oranges.

Also, consumers have to pay (through a tax on the utility bill usually) for periods when renewables produce too much. See negatives prices in Germany [1] or Britain paying windfarms owners more than £1 million a week to shut their production down [2].

[1] https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/why-power-prices-...

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/1132...

Bear in mind that even the best offshore wind systems only produce about 65% of their rated output, on average. You have no real control over the when and how much and for how long of that, either.

Given that the market price of the electricity when the wind is blowing is usually below €20/MWh (see time series on pfbach.dk), I hope they are expecting to reduce the price even more because it is still too expensive for the current market.

There is a linear dependency between the wind production (and solar production) and the market price: the more intermittent energy is available on the market, the lower the price.

I would say it only helps because it prevents (or reduces) the amount of additional green house gasses released in the atmosphere. I doubt converting wind energy to electricity and then "storing" that electricity/energy somehow and somewhere (such that it doesn't turn into heat) is a stupidly inefficient way of using that wind mill to reduce further global warming. Use the electricity, and don't use the fossil fuel that would have otherwise been used.

Related question I guess for someone with more knowledge about this... If green house gas concentrations were as they were before the industrial revolution, but we were outputting in the current world's energy consumption in heat, what would the temperature rise be? I'm guessing it's almost negligible, with the sun's radiation hitting the earth in one hour supposedly being enough to power the entire earth for a year.

It makes no difference overall, but locally there are effects from mixing.

Normally at night, land tends to cool faster than the air higher up because of the difference in emissivity. But the increased turbulence and mixing from wind turbines counteracts this, resulting in localized warming of land.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2018.09.009

No, only radiating it to space can do that.

To start the amount being removed is absolutely minuscule compared to the amount around. On top of that close to the surface (which is where even the tall turbines are relative to the full scale of things) we're only seeing a tiny fraction of the actual energy in the atmosphere due to surface friction slowing down winds near the surface. And yeah even if we were actually capturing any appreciable amount of the energy most of it does become waste heat once it's used so it just enters back somewhere else.

I don't think you appreciate the scale of the energies involve here. The heat accumulation of global warming is many orders of magnitude greater than electric consumption (not even wind power generation). Even if you could perfectly store and remove all the energy that wind power generated, it would be barely a rounding error.

The key is lowering CO2 production.