Solar And Wind Make Electricity More Expensive

Apr 22, 2019, 11:11am
Unreliable Nature Of Solar And Wind Makes Electricity More Expensive, New Study Finds
Michael Shellenberger
Contributor, Forbes.com

I write about energy and the environment

Solar panels and wind turbines are making electricity significantly more expensive, a major new study by a team of economists from the University of Chicago finds.

Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS) "significantly increase average retail electricity prices, with prices increasing by 11% (1.3 cents per kWh) seven years after the policy’s passage into law and 17% (2 cents per kWh) twelve years afterward," the economists write.

The study, which has yet to go through peer-review, was done by Michael Greenstone, Richard McDowell, and Ishan Nath. It compared states with and without an RPS. It did so using what the economists say is "the most comprehensive state-level dataset ever compiled" which covered 1990 to 2015.

The cost to consumers has been staggeringly high: "All in all, seven years after passage, consumers in the 29 states had paid $125.2 billion more for electricity than they would have in the absence of the policy," they write.

Last year, I was the first journalist to report that solar and wind are making electricity more expensive in the United States — and for inherently physical reasons.

Solar and wind require that natural gas plants, hydro-electric dams, batteries or some other form of reliable power be ready at a moment’s notice to start churning out electricity when the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, I noted.

And unreliability requires solar- and/or wind-heavy places like Germany, California, and Denmark to pay neighboring nations or states to take their solar and wind energy when they are producing too much of it.

My reporting was criticized — sort of — by those who claimed I hadn't separated correlation from causation, but the new study by a top-notch team of economists, including an advisor to Barack Obama, proves I was right.

Previous studies were misleading, the economists note, because they didn't "incorporate three key costs," which are the unreliability of renewables, the large amounts of land they require, and the displacement of cheaper "baseload" energy sources like nuclear plants.

The higher cost of electricity reflects "the costs that renewables impose on the generation system," the economists note, "including those associated with their intermittency, higher transmission costs, and any stranded asset costs assigned to ratepayers."

But are renewables cost-effective climate policy? They are not. The economists write that "the cost per metric ton of CO2 abated exceeds $130 in all specifications and ranges up to $460, making it at least several times larger than conventional estimates of the social cost of carbon."

The economists note that the Obama Administration’s core estimate of the social cost of carbon was $50 per ton in 2019 dollars, while the price of carbon is just $5 in the US northeast’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), and $15 in California’s cap-and-trade system.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2019/04/22/unreliable-nature-of-solar-and-wind-makes-electricity-much-more-expensive-major-new-study-finds/

The Green New Deal Will Hit the Poor With Higher Energy Costs
"It's upside-down Robin Hood.”
JOHN STOSSEL | 4.24.2019 12:00 AM

The Green New Deal's goal is to move America to zero carbon emissions in 10 years.

"That's a goal you could only imagine possible if you have no idea how energy is produced," James Meigs, former editor of Popular Mechanics magazine, says in my latest video.

"Renewable is so inconsistent," he adds. "You can't just put in wind turbines and solar panels. You have to build all this infrastructure to connect them with energy consumers."

Because wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine, "renewable" energy requires many more transmission lines, and bigger batteries.

Unfortunately, says Meigs: "You have to mine materials for batteries. Those mines are environmentally hazardous. Disposing of batteries is hazardous."

"Batteries are a lousy way to store energy," adds physicist Mark Mills, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Also, the ingredients of green energy, like battery packs, are far from green.

"You have to consume 100 barrels of oil in China to make that battery pack," he explains. "Dig up 1,000 pounds of stuff to process it. Digging is done with oil, by big machines, so we're consuming energy to 'save' energy—not a good path to go."

Still, wind turbines and solar batteries are 10 times more efficient than when they were first introduced! That's not good enough, writes Mills, to make "the new energy economy" anything more than "magical thinking."

"They hit physics limits. In comic books, Tony Stark has a magic power source, but physics makes it impossible to make solar 10 times better again."

The dream of "green" causes us to misdirect resources. Even after billions in government subsidies, solar still makes up less than 1 percent of America's energy—wind just 2 percent. And even that energy isn't really "clean."

"We use billions of tons of hydrocarbons to make the windmills that are already in the world, and we've only just begun to make them at the level people claim they would like them to be built," says Mills. "Pursue a path of wind, solar and batteries, we increase how much we dig up and move by a thousand-fold."

"You gotta clear-cut the forest. These machines kill a lot of birds," says Meigs. "I agree that we should bring down our carbon emissions…but we should also make sure we're spending money on stuff that really works."

There is one energy source, though, that efficiently produces lots of power with no carbon emissions: nuclear.

But people fear it. They point to the Chernobyl plant accident in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan.

"The Chernobyl plant design was idiotically bad," says Meigs. They don't make nuclear plants like that anymore.

What about Fukushima?

"Fukushima helps prove how safe nuclear power really is. No one was killed."

I pointed out that people were killed during the evacuation.

"Fear of radiation killed people," responded Meigs. They evacuated older people who didn't need to go.

People fear what they don't understand and what they can't see.

"A dam breaks, and hundreds of thousands of people die. Nuclear plants, their safety, ironically, is actually evident in their accidents!" says Mills.

"More people have fallen off of roofs installing solar panels than have been killed in the entire history of nuclear power in the U.S.," adds Meigs.

Yet after Fukushima, Germany shut down its nuclear plants. That led to higher electricity prices and increased carbon emissions because Germany burned coal to make up for the loss of nuclear power.

Likewise, "in Bernie Sanders' home state of Vermont, they shut down their nuclear plant. Guess what happened? Carbon emissions went up," recounts Meigs. "This supposedly green state, ultra-liberal Vermont, went backwards."

If a Green New Deal is ever implemented, says Mills, it would rob the poor by raising energy costs, while "giving money to wealthy people in the form of subsidies to buy $100,000 cars, to put expensive solar arrays on their roofs or to be investors in wind farms."

"It's upside-down Robin Hood," he adds. "That's a bad deal."

Yet a majority of Americans—including Republicans surveyed—say they support some version of it.

LIBERALS CAN STICK IT WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE LOL

oliver clotheshoffe wrote:

LIBERALS CAN STICK IT WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE LOL

Libs also come up with this sorta crap:
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New NC Bill Would Require Hybrid Owners To Pay Extra Fees To Offset Gas They Don’t Use
By Adrianna Robinson - April 12, 201951401

NC State Legislators have just introduced a new bill that would require hybrid and electric vehicle owners to pay an extra annual fee to offset the gas taxes they aren’t paying since their vehicles don’t use as much gas as non-hybrid vehicles.

According to the new Senate Bill 446, electric owners would be required to pay almost 2 times what they already pay in annual registration fees (currently $130 per year). By the year 2022, it would rise to $275, higher than any other state in the nation (there are currently 19 other states that require additional fees for hybrid and electric owners).

Hybrid vehicle owners would also be required to pay an extra annual fee for the first time, which would start at $87.50 in 2020 and rise to $137.50 by 2022.

The NC State Transportation Committee approved the bill on Wednesday and it’s now being sent to the finance committee, if passed, it will move onto the floor for a vote.