> And so the coal power plants needed more money to stay afloat,
Green energy is great. Going really well in the uk. Super cheap with all those subsidies……………… I mean contracts for difference we pay for it.
Green energy is great. Going really well in the uk. Super cheap with all those subsidies……………… I mean contracts for difference we pay for it.
Just visit the Wikipedia page for Hinkley Point [1], read the section on economics, and weep. That's your money at work. And it has been the same for coal, oil, gas, and now solar and wind energy, all over Europe and the US.
On a level playing field without subsidies, where we can build solar and wind power generators at scale like today, they would pummel all the other energy sources on costs alone (just think of all the raw material you don't need to burn to make your turbines turn).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinkley_Point_C_nuclear_power_...
On a level playing field without subsidies, we'd be in underdevelopped shitholes. The idea that a modern economy can grow without some agency being brought in somehow is utopia.
> where we can build solar and wind power generators at scale
How do you build those, without the decades of subsidies to ramp up production and decrease costs?
> they would pummel all the other energy sources on costs alone
They would collapse the existing grid. There's a reason why Germany is investing €450bn in its grid to support continued growth [1]. Batteries could make up for it, but scaling batteries won't happen without subsidies.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-rejigs-sprea...
If your accounting model is "build some production, plug it to the grid and let someone else worry about the details", sure, you're right. But if you factor in grid development costs, the picture is different.
For instance, you lften hear about Germany importing lots of energy, and usually there's always someone to say "But they export a lot, too". Well, these imports & exports require lines to happen, and these lines aren't cheap. The EU mandates that countries should develop interconnexion to facilitate the market, but this ruling mostly helps intermittent energy sources.
Another example in France, where the south-western region has a lot of solar, and not many industrial consumers. To make things worse, that region is close to an interconnexion with Spain, which has a lot of solar production. In order to move all that power to places where it can be used, new lines have to be built.
These costs are not factored in if you only price new production, but they're also significant.
The French grid would be even more uneconomical without the interconnections.
https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/cross-border-electrici...
They are reducing production almost daily these days, but usually around 12-14h, due to solar production.
Remember, prior to the 1960s and 1970s expansions of the federal bureaucracy the government didn't really get as proactively involved in this sort of thing as they are now. Though there were several cases in which they lit a pile of money on fire and kept feeding it until they got the results they wanted (I can't think of an example of this that wasn't directed at defense tech though).
I think it would likely be a lateral move, or close enough to lateral that we can't really say with a high degree of certainty whether it would have turned out better or worse. I think it's very possible that without tax breaks we'd have gotten more solar earlier but with a slower adoption curve after that if none of this stuff was subsidized.
[1] I know of none but I don't want some nit picker to find some case where someone got a $2k research grant in 1961 and act like that invalidates the point here.
Why not? There is a worldwide and increasing demand for them.
That demand is created by the variations in prices created by renewables, which are themselves subsidized. In a world with coal, gas, nuclear or hydro, there simply is not enough demand to develop batteries.
So, in a world with no subsidies, how do you pay for batteries, not good ones but bad ones for decades until the industry ramps up? It simply doesn't happen.
It's not an indictment either. Subsidies are simply the way heavy industrial investments work, and in the electricity sector investments are so massive that without subsidy, barely anything happens.
A world completely without subsidies would indeed work different, but still would have demand for batteries.
We started to price in the CO2 externalities - and demand is skyrocketing.
Subsidies are more of a geopolitical/welfare thing in this context.
I'm not arguing against subsidies, I'm arguing against ignoring the subsidies we provided and provide for older forms of energy generation while lamenting that we subsidize new forms.
https://www.current-news.co.uk/cfds-set-to-pay-back-10-5bn-a...
Unlike natural gas, which has been made much more expensive by the war.