Ask HN: Is wind power financially viable without subsidies? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is wind power financially viable without subsidies?

20 pointsxnx56 comments

It's very hard to find current non-ideological information on this topic.

I won't address the cost, but an important point to remember is for many countries energy security is national security, food security is national security.

It is important for them that they can't be held hostage to fossil fuel supplies.

It's been a big issue for western european countries during the ukraine war.

> It's been a big issue for western european countries during the ukraine war.

In 2018, Germany (and France) were warned about their dependence and deals with Russia on oil and gas - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu57D9YcIk0

Russia did not opt to stop supplying them with gas. They cut themselves off at America's prompting.

The Germans couldn't be bothered to find out what parties were truly responsible for the blowing up of the NordStream pipelines, pipelines that the companies involved in were sanctioned by the US.

In fact, it did. Russia told, there was a broken turbine involved, but even after repairs didn't take it back. Later it said, the unfriendly behaviour (sanctions, because of the Ukraine invasion) was the cause of stopping gas delivery.

Yeah that's what Trump doesn't get when he gets angry about wind power. The Netherlands is a rich country it doesn't need handouts from American oil companies pumping up a few million barrels of oil. What it needs is electricity for the next 100 years and that's why the Dutch part of the North Sea is being paved over with turbines.

Or held hostage to the weather.

A number of headlines have come out recently touting China's progress on electrification, and predicting that they will soon (if they don't already) dominate the solar/battery/EV markets.

The part often glossed over is that while the U.S. and Russia both have large oil reserves and domestic production capabilities, China has virtually nothing in comparison. Their production is about 1/4 that of the U.S. despite having 4x the population, meaning that per capita, they have < 1/16th the oil available. Electrification is a matter of national security for them, because any major global geopolitical conflict (say, the escalation of the Russia/Ukraine war, or a Russia/US conflict, or more turmoil in the Middle East) will cut off the flow of oil imports and grind China's already-weakened economy to a halt.

Follow the incentives and you can predict the outcomes.

> The part often glossed over is that while the U.S. and Russia both have large oil reserves and domestic production capabilities, China has virtually nothing in comparison.

China is 13th of the list with an estimated 25.1 billion barrels of untapped oil reserves.

The U.S. is 9th in the list with 55 billion barrels. Venezuela tops the list with and estimated 303 billion barrels.

China also has a long term strategic policy on resource management. Long term strategic planning is deep within Chinese cultural psyche.

Wondering around certain regions of China you’ll see many capped wells, and when you ask a Chinese official about them, one may be lucky to get the real answer as to why they are capped and not being used.

The answer given was “why use ours now? We use everyone else’s until it’s all gone, and then we use ours”.

China is playing the long game. It’s a slow patient 2000 year old culture that had an odd blip 100 years ago and is now moving back to business as usual. Underestimate China at your peril.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_proven_...

> The answer given was “why use ours now? We use everyone else’s until it’s all gone, and then we use ours”.

I think that's the lie, not the real answer.

I don't know about China, but an unused oil well fills with sand very quick in most regions. Production can't be restarted after that. A new well is needed.

That doesn't mean they can't abandon an oil well that still have oil with the intention of digging another one later, it's just very expensive to do it.

Not saying I agree that this is an actual Chinese strategy, but the idea is that, for now, they just don't drill production wells that pull from these reserves, not that they stop producing from existing wells.

Those are reserves that are economically recoverable at current prices. The U.S. has absolutely enormous deposits of shale oil that can be (and are, right now) mined with current technology, they are just more expensive than liquid oil and so generally not economically worth it at current prices. In the event of a major geopolitical conflict that sends the price of oil skyrocketing, you can bet that the U.S. is going to tap its estimated 2.175 trillion barrels of shale oil reserves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_reserves_in_the_United_Sta...

> The answer given was “why use ours now? We use everyone else’s until it’s all gone, and then we use ours”.

I can not say it's true or not

I can say, when we(Chinese) are children, there's a saying that Japan was storing oil and coal on the seabed near its coast, and the reason:

“why use ours now? We use everyone else’s until it’s all gone, and then we use ours”

China has the 2nd largest coal reserve globally. They also produce 61% of their electricity from Coal-fired power plants.

Say what you will about contributing to increasing global greenhouse gas emissions but their energy security is not as dire as you paint it. They're still diversifying it though through hydro/nuclear/wind/solar sources.

Losing gasoline would absolutely suck for them, though. They have a commuter economy like all the other developed economies; if people can't go to work, the economy ceases to function. Hence the strong push toward EVs.

China has abundant coal, abundant hydro, lots of solar potential (although I think their installed base is just getting started), and decent wind. It makes a lot of sense for them to electrify their economy so that they can transform those coal and hydro resources to something you can drive around.

You can make gasoline out of coal. That was in fact Hitler's backup plan for WWII, in case he failed to secure the oil fields he needed.

Only 20% of China's energy consumption is in the form of electricity. The rest is transport, heating and cooking. They do use some coal for heating & cooking but it's fairly negligible. Therefore coal only supplies about 13% of energy.

It is in the North Sea. Since 2020, the subsidies for North Sea wind power have been negative.

The North Sea is ideal for wind power -- steady winds and high electricity prices. Other places may vary.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-the-era-of-negative-s...

Merit order is a hidden subsidy. Other means of producing electricity that have a theoretically lower marginal cost will need to curb their production.

The marginal cost of wind & solar is essentially zero, it's virtually all capital cost.

I'd also love to see some high quality, well researched information on this.

For instance I recently saw this exchange: https://x.com/i/bookmarks?post_id=1881090543956222293

I'm generally a proponent of renewables, but I think it's also important to take seriously quantitative arguments against them. But without good sources, it's impossible to work out who's right.

This is useful to suggest solar will win in the end: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/levelized-cost-of-energy?...

But much less clear how well wind, especially offshore, can compete.

This is also decent but doesn't get much into cost: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/can-solar-and-wind...

It looks like Twitter bookmark links don't work if the link opener doesn't have that item bookmarked. This link should work though: https://x.com/LoftusSteve/status/1881090543956222293

What is financially viable independent of politics? What doesn't have subsidies? Did the petroleum industry pay for the millions that were lead poisoned? Do they pay for the environmental damage caused by climate change? Those are also subsidies.

This is a non-answer that doubles as a tacit admission that the cost/benefit ratio for wind power is terrible (it is)

Is that still true if the costs of oil/gas stop being socialized? Basically the people pay for oil cleanups, for air polution, etc, the cost is still there it's just not currently born by the oil companies. Also, how do the costs stack up if you drop all oil subsidies?

If the math is arbitrary enough then yes wind power is the 100% ideal perfect energy source.

At least it doesn't disrupt the gulf stream

It's saying that society pays a price for fossil fuel emissions, in terms of damage to our climate and our health. Millions of people die every year from fossil fuel emissions. If we attach a price to that death and destruction, and apply that as a cost towards fossil fuels, it makes the financial subsidies of wind and solar insignificant.

> Millions of people die every year from fossil fuel emissions

Citation needed. “Millions a year” is undoubtedly using some flimsy justification for the figure.

nope

https://hsph.harvard.edu/climate-health-c-change/news/fossil...

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38030155/

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/29/air-poll...

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1819989116

https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj-2023-077784

there is tons of data to support this, and it's a widely accepted reality

These all seem to reference the same model, the actual studies are all pay walled, and there’s no way to get access to the model. Priesthood vibes

I don't know much about wind power economics so you should certainly not take my "tacit" word for it.

Check for LCOE, there's a lot of research on that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

LCOE doesn't make much sense when you think about it. It doesn't include storage necessary for intermittent energy sources, nor grid costs. It also doesn't account for how much variation there is in renewable potential geographically - 1 solar panel produces far less electricity in Poland than it would produce in Spain.

LCOE is good for marginal analysis, but quite bad for a systemic and holistic view

What led me to try and find out more was this unsupported comment from Francois Chollet (who seems like a smart guy):

"Also -- solar has certainly a big role to play, but wind power is largely a scam. No one should be building wind turbines. " https://x.com/fchollet/status/1881059960928543117

https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

This is a good place to start for sure. There is a DOE equivalent here: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation.... .

One simple issue with LCOE estimates is that their revenues are not all equal. For example, rooftop residential solar seems very expensive (no economies of scale) but since residential electricity rates are high and you don't have to pay (as much) for transmission, they can be very financially viable, at least recently. Solar PV + storage looks more expensive, but that's because it shifts the supply to more valuable times (i.e. cuts the duck curve). Gas is more valuable than it seems because it is reliable on rainy days.

In my estimation the fact that wind and solar are often anticorrelated makes onshore wind basically financially viable without subsidies in some places (I think $27/MWh is basically viable).

Can you elaborate on your question?

Do you mean:

* are there scenarios where a new wind power installation would be profitable without subsidies today?

* are there examples of window power installations becoming profitable without subsidies already?

* are there examples of existing wind power installations demonstrating a positive ROI against subsidies that were committed?

* hypothetically, how would wind power, as an abstract industry, compare against alternatives if subsidies had never been never committed?

* hypothetically, would wind power installations that are now viable without direct subsidies have been possible without industry subsidies in the past?

etc

These all have different answers/analyses and your question is ambiguous across them. And that's probably why you're not finding the answers you want. Not because those answers are not available, but just because your question is too vague to have one conclusive answer in the first place.

Mainly interested if any private business would start construction of a new wind power project in the US without any government subsidies using today's technology.

Would it need to compete against the government subsidies that other forms of power generation receive?

With our without government regulations and bureaucracy? Trump threw up a bunch more regulatory barriers against wind power yesterday.

I was trying to imagine some neutral scenario where there wasn't onerous restriction or cash incentives.

You could ask if ROI is higher than other energy sources / investments?

It depends on what you use to buffer / store it, really. But generally its price per MWh is dropping as turbines get bigger, so short of any specifics in the question around the part of the mix it forms, a "yes" would seem to apply.

Wind sometimes gets less valuable as storage gets cheaper. Wind generally blows strongest at dusk/dawn when demand is high and solar is poorly available. But cheap storage allows cheap solar to fill the dusk demand.

Fair point, storage changes things. Being as I live in Britain though, I'm going to assume solar won't be much good for us in winter even if there's storage :)

Also vaguely related, it is bizarre that we don't do more with compressed air energy storage.

I think it depends on many things. Also ideology can play a heavy hand -- just imagine how the costs may fluctuate if country A decides to ban import of cheap wind power stuffs from country B.

Finland electricity price fell after losing Finland-Estonia link in the recent anchor "incident." This is because Finland exports to middle Europe are now more limited.

Yeah. I believe geopolitics can be the deciding factor for the next decades.

I wonder how would do you separate non/ideological material on the topic?

Ideology can (and pretty often is) implicitly embedded in our reasoning and the way we sort facts even when we are not aware of it.

To truly answer this you'd need a free market in energy, which amongst other things would also require answering the question of "is fossil fuel power viable without subsidies", which in turn would require halting the current allowed externalities the industry is built on as well as all sorts of other explicit and implicit subsidies (such as costs associated with military power to secure/protects supplies). To achieve good valuation/resource allocation/price discovery, in a market goods need to have all their associated costs built into the price. Since fossil fuels are allowed to dump pollution into the atmosphere and socialize the cost of that, there's no level playing field. Though we can observe that building in such a cost would be super easy, just regulate that all carbon emissions be net zero buy requiring a ton of CO2 be extracted from the atmosphere for every ton of CO2-equivalent emission. It's telling that the industry has been rabidly opposed.

While letting the market work would be the most efficient approach, as a political matter it's proven near impossible to just jump straight into eliminating all subsidies, so we're left with more awkward dueling sets of them. But frankly the amount of subsidization of fossil fuels since the start of the industrial revolution has been so mind blowingly expansive that it's pretty hard to take seriously any whining at all about trying to vaguely kinda even things out with regards to low pollution energy sources. All this putting aside decentralization/redundancy, national security objectives and so on.

Fun fact - heavy industry cannot run on renewable energy nor is it reliable in the winter months when more energy is needed.

Ever heard of Dunkelflaute?

Where it is windy, yes.

Just as windmills were.

Yeah, there is a lot of misinformation being spread about wind power. Sweden's last wind power subsidies were scrapped over then years ago but producers are still investing heavily in wind power. The limiting factor is Sweden's anti-woke, Trump light, "culture-warring" government. Because the environmentalists like wind power they hate it. Consequently, they have successfully stopped lots of privately funded wind power investments. Which is a shame since Sweden has some of the best wind resources in Europe.

Btw, Lazard's LCOE reports are a great source for cost on power generation for various types of power: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/levelized-cost-of-e...

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